Photographers recall the flood

Half the people in the wide photo have their backs to the camera, so we can't see their faces. But some of the others on the far side of the long line of people, turned toward us, appear to be smiling.

At first that seems odd. A human chain passes sandbags as they work up to their waists in dark river water. Above their heads, in bright red letters, a sign reads: Emergency.

They certainly aren't dressed for the occasion. They wear T-shirts and jeans, for the most part; no reassuring hip-waders are in evidence.

Yet here they are, outside Mercy Medical Center in southeast Cedar Rapids, captured in this photo from June 13, 2008.

The photographer who took this shot, Jim Slosiarek, was working The Gazette's overnight shift that day.

“After kicking myself for not getting to the epic sandbagging effort to protect the city's last water pump earlier, we headed to Mercy Medical Center to cover activities there,” he told me when I asked about this picture.

“I was struck with the huge turnout of residents sandbagging in knee-deep and waist-deep water. I'd left my waders in the car and debated going back for them but decided to just go in.”

For those of us who weren't here in 2008, we can't pretend to truly know what it was like during the catastrophic flood of 2008. But we can get a sense of things from the remarkable photos taken during those tense days, many of which I first glimpsed in archive issues of The Gazette and in the book, “Epic Surge: Eastern Iowa's Unstoppable Flood of 2008.”

Slosiarek's sandbagging photo is there, as are aerial shots by Liz Martin.

“When the flood hit, I had only lived in Cedar Rapids for about six months, so I really didn't know much outside of what I had covered for the paper,” Martin related. “After filing my early photos …, our (then-) director of photography, Paul Jensen, suggested I go along to get aerial photos from (SourceMedia CEO Chuck) Peters's four-seat plane ….

“We left early enough to photograph right as the flood crested, so the aerials of downtown are about as high as the water got,” she said. “It was strange to see the water from above after spending the previous day and morning waist-deep in it.”

Martin's sweeping shot of the Cedar River swamping Cedar Rapids's bridges - and city hall and the Linn County courthouse and jail - wrapped the front and back of June 13's Gazette news section. Friday the 13th.

It's a frightening scene: Most of the gray picture spread across those two pages is made up of water and sky - the buildings look like unsubstantial toys.

(One headline above the photo, probably not ironically, declares: “WATER IN SHORT SUPPLY.”)

“I'll admit, in addition to trying to photograph everything I could,” Martin confessed about taking those aerial shots, “I was also focusing on keeping my breakfast down.”

Myriad images from those weeks show Corridor residents variously praying, crying, angry and relieved as they scour through water-damaged possessions from their houses and businesses. Among them was Todd Gareau and Julie Stevens, photographed in front of their flood-scarred Cedar Rapids home.

In Martin's picture, Richards clasps their small dog in one arm and has his other arm around his fiancée. He's holding onto what is precious, as he gazes off to the right.

Dequilla stares directly at the camera, at us, unblinking.

For photographer Cliff Jette, those long weeks of documenting the flood became “a bit of a blur,” he said. “It was several weeks of 12- to 15-hour days, with no time off for weeks on end.

“At times it took three hours to get from one side of the river to the other on (Interstate) 380. The photo editors were calling with requests or tips faster than you get to things,” Jette remembered.

“The biggest impression I have is going home at dusk one of the days around when the water crested, and my part of town was serene and peaceful, people out mowing and grilling out. I felt like I was coming out of a war zone … a 10-minute drive later, everything was normal.”

Jette's shot of Barb Ferguson, wife of the owner of Polehna's Meat Market, grieving over the damage done to the Czech Village business, is heartbreaking.

Yet these images also relay another story, one of a resilient people banding together, of a community that stuck together. Though the 2008 flood may have been the Corridor's 9/11, the center held.

That's why some of the folk in that Mercy Medical sandbagging photo are smiling. They know, at their core, that they are doing something important.

They are saving property. They are fortifying a future.