Desperate Hours: How volunteers and skilled workers saved a city's water supply

Originally published July 6, 2008

CEDAR RAPIDS -- Greg Eyerly, Mike Little and Mike Lynch drive down the short gravel road to Collector Well 3.

It's been raining most of the morning.

The wellhouse sits on an earthen pyramid just off Edgewood Road NW. Normally, the building looks down on the Cedar River.

It is noon Thursday, June 12, and the flooding Cedar is a couple of feet below the base of the building. A white generator the size of a semi-trailer truck powers two of the three pumps inside. The wellhouse is on a peninsula, but it looks OK. The men leave.

Over the next several minutes, the river surges.

Rising water either floods the pump motors or cuts electricity to 49 of the city's 50 wells. The northwest water treatment plant stops operating because no water is flowing into it.

Only Collector Well 3 remains.

All the water in Cedar Rapids for drinking, for fighting fires, for flushing toilets and for taking showers is coming from two blue pumps inside one building a few feet from the swollen, turbulent river.

"Better double-check that one really quick," Eyerly thinks.

An athletic 43-year-old with short-cropped dark hair, Eyerly runs ultra marathons in his spare time. He is four months into his job overseeing operation of the water and wastewater treatment plants in Cedar Rapids.

He drives back to Collector Well 3. Water is touching the base of the building.

He's alone. It's raining. City radios and telephones are down. He tries to call Lynch, the operations manager at the water plant, on his cell phone. The call won't go through.

Eyerly drives the 10 minutes to the J Avenue plant for help.

Normally, the city of Cedar Rapids water system pumps 65 million gallons of clean water into homes and businesses each day. That water comes from wells along a 4.5-mile stretch of the river, upstream from downtown.

Forty-six of the wells consist of two straight green pipes -- one large and one smaller -- that rise 10 to 20 feet in the air, where the pump motor and controls sit on a maintenance platform. The large pipe runs about 65 feet below the ground and holds the pump. The smaller pipe runs to the water main. These are called vertical wells, and they're built above the 100-year flood plain.

All of those wells are knocked out that Thursday afternoon -- either submerged or without power.

The other four wells, called collectors, collect about 45 percent of the city's water. They're housed in cinderblock buildings on raised earthen berms in the woods along the river. In each one, three pumps pull water from sand and gravel 60 or 70 feet below ground.

The three pumps feed three baby-blue 16-inch pipes that join above the building's bare concrete floor and flow to a water main connected to one of the city's two water treatment plants.

When floodwaters rose to the doorknobs of three of the collector wells, they inundated either the electrical boxes inside or the high-voltage fuses outside. Those sound like shotguns when they blow, says Roy Hesemann, manager of the city's water plants.

Saving Collector Well 3 becomes the city's top priority that Thursday afternoon.

Eyerly and several workers race back to the wellhouse. Truckloads of sandbags start arriving from all over town. The river keeps rising, fast.

The wellhouse is now an island, and water is seeping into the building. Thunderstorms pound Cedar Rapids through the afternoon. Workers drop sandbags into knee-deep water.

They're worried about the generator outside the building. If floodwater causes it to short out, the pumps will stop, and Cedar Rapids will have no water.

Someone calls Coonrod Wrecker & Crane Service to bring in a crane to lift the generator onto wooden blocks. Thunder rolls, lightning crashes. The men slosh through a gray downpour.

The crane rolls into the quickly rising foot-deep water.

"They had their crane arm up in the air during the thunder and lightning," Eyerly remembers. "Those guys are fearless."

Don Coonrod, a partner in the company, stands in the bed of a dump truck hooking the crane to the generator when a bolt of lightning strikes nearby. The crane operator, Dean Spicer, swings the crane away from the dump truck. They wait a minute, then get back to work.

"I don't know what would have happened," Coonrod says of a lightning strike. "I was more interested, I guess, in getting the generator up before the river got any higher."

By about 6 p.m., the roughly 80 city workers at the well are out of sandbags. Eyerly calls Public Works Manager Craig Hanson.

"I've got bags, and I've got sand," Eyerly remembers Hanson saying. "But I've got no sandbags."

Bundles of bags and truckloads of sand begin to arrive on Edgewood Road just off the bridge, about 100 yards from the wellhouse.

The weather is crazy. As the afternoon turns into evening, the sun shines through a downpour. Eyerly tells everyone to take a break, maybe get something to eat.

When they get back to work, they fall behind.

Brandon Schrock, a 25-year-old who works down the road from the J Avenue water plant, is filling sandbags on 16th Avenue SW with a couple of friends and about 70 other volunteers. A police sergeant stops by about 7:30 p.m. and says the city needs 30 more people to help at the well off Edgewood.

The sergeant gives Schrock his business card and tells him to take the emergency lane on Interstate 380 across the river. Flip on your flashers, he says, and if anyone stops you, show my card.

When the new recruits arrive at the wellhouse, seven truckloads of sand have been dumped by the bridge, but the city workers can barely keep up with the rising river. Seven volunteers are there -- Schrock, his two friends and four girls wearing Xavier High School T-shirts.

Someone calls KCRG-TV9 reporter Justin Foss and asks him to put out the call for volunteers.

He runs outside to the nearest TV camera and yells for the producers to put him on. It is just after 10 p.m. He comes on-screen -- sweaty and a little wild-eyed.

"The city is in dire need of sandbaggers right now to help protect the city's only suction well left. They usually have four suction wells operating. There are three down right now. This is the only suction well left operating in the city," he says. "They're putting out a call to anybody that has time right now to sandbag."

He repeats the directions to the collector well three times. Radio and other television stations also put out the call.

Within minutes, a wave of people is flowing across the bridge from northeast Cedar Rapids, some carrying shovels.

Teenagers, young families, men and women of all ages show up. A few men roll up on motorcycles with shovels strapped to their backs. Cars line Edgewood Road NE at least a mile up the road to AEGON.

"It was like the 'Field of Dreams,'" Nick Scott, one of the two friends with Schrock, remembers. "When you looked up Edgewood Bridge, it was just shoulder to shoulder."

The legion of volunteers forms five lines stretching from the piles of sand, down Edgewood Road and up the drive into the knee-deep, fast-flowing river water around the wellhouse.

It is a "human army," Eyerly says, a flurry of motion.

To Schrock, it feels as if it has been rehearsed, scripted: "Everyone was on the same page."

The volunteers work furiously under portable floodlights. Fog rolls off the river. Twice it rains -- hard, brief and cold. The crowd flinches under the downpour.

By 11 p.m., more than 10,000 sandbags surround the marooned wellhouse. Eyerly thinks it will hold.

He walks up and down the lines telling people he thinks the job is done. It takes 10 minutes to stop everyone.

As word spreads that they have succeeded, the volunteers -- anywhere from 1,000 to 2,000, depending on who you ask -- celebrate by doing the wave. It rolls up and down the lines, over and over. People cheer.

Many of them leave to help put sandbags around Mercy Medical Center.

More volunteers are still coming. Bumper-to-bumper headlights line Glass Road NE, from Edgewood Road to Interstate 380 and on both off-ramps at the interchange.

A man takes it upon himself to direct traffic at the corner of Glass and Wenig roads, which is overwhelmed.

When Schrock hears there are enough volunteers at Mercy, he and his friends drive to Alburnett, his hometown, to get drinks and watch flood coverage on TV.

As the adrenaline subsides at Collector Well 3, Hesemann, the city's water plant manager, is driving along Interstate 380. He has just flown home from a conference in Atlanta. When he left Sunday, the river was forecast to crest at about 14 feet.

Hesemann, 45, worked for several years as a private water well contractor before taking a job with the city in 1999. He is soft-spoken and deliberate. Like many of the men in the Water Department, he sports a mustache.

"I usually take things in stride," he says.

It's raining again. Downtown is dark.

As he crosses the river, a flash of lightning gives him his first look at the city. He is facing downstream, and for a half-second he sees it all -- City Hall, the Linn County Courthouse, the buildings along the river, under a lot of water.

"I guess that was my first concept of how big of an issue it was going to be," Hesemann says.

He arrives at the Water Department Administration Building on J Avenue NE, grabs jeans and boots from his trunk and a T-shirt from the supply closet. Eyerly turns over control to Hesemann and heads back to the endangered wastewater treatment plant in the southeast quadrant.

Hesemann and Lynch, a rangy 56-year-old, decide to hook into the Marion and Hiawatha water systems to buy time.

They call officials in Marion at 2:15 a.m. Friday the 13th. Three hours later, a Marion firetruck is pumping water from a Marion fire hydrant to a Cedar Rapids fire hydrant. Hiawatha is doing the same by midmorning.

Even with the help from Marion and Hiawatha, the Cedar Rapids water system is at a "critical stage," Utilities Director Pat Ball says at a 10 a.m. news conference.

It's pumping at 25 percent capacity, and reserves are running out. If people don't restrict their usage, water pressure will drop in parts of town and people will have to boil their water to make sure it's safe.

That morning, Hesemann and water maintenance supervisor Little get into a U.S. Coast Guard boat on Ellis Road a mile east of Highway 94. They want to survey the damage.

Ellis Road is now a corridor of water through the quiet trees along the Cedar River. The river loops south there through the Seminole Valley and swings slightly north before the Edgewood Road bridge.

They float past Collector Wells 1 and 2. Water is up to the doorknobs on both buildings. The only sounds are rushing water and the boat motor. All the vertical pumps in the area are submerged.

But the exhaust fan at Collector Well 4 is still running. Hesemann and Little hear it over the water. Somehow, the building still has power.

Back at Collector Well 3, the only source of drinking water for all of Cedar Rapids, maintenance crews, using 5-gallon containers, are hauling fuel from Edgewood Road to the generator.

Water -- 2 inches deep on the floor of the building -- is seeping in as fast as they can pump it out. Crews keep up a 24-hour vigil that will last a week.

Lynch and Scott Christensen, a lead operator at the Water Department, decide they need another generator at the well.

Usually only two of the three pumps at a collector well are running. The third is kept as a spare, and anyway, the generator at Collector Well 3 can power only two pumps. They want to start the third pump, which requires a 200-kilowatt generator.

Christensen can't find a generator that size in Cedar Rapids, so he arranges for a company in Chicago to send one. On the phone, Lynch tells him it's OK to go ahead.

"Well, that's a good thing because it's on the way," Christensen says.

He meets the semi-trailer truck in Center Point and leads the driver to the wellhouse off Edgewood. By 11:30 p.m. Friday, the third pump is running.

The river crests Friday morning at 31.12 feet -- 19 feet above flood stage, 11 feet above the previous record.

Saturday morning, June 14, Guy Ayers-Berry, who owns a diving company in Mechanicsville, takes Little and several electricians to Collector Well 4.

Ayers-Berry and Little drop the electricians off at the wellhouse, then churn off into the river to see if any of the vertical wells, their platforms now poking out of the water, can be revived.

Floodwater is swirling through the trees along the river, and the Australian-born Ayers-Berry, 49, must pick his way through the flood plain.

"You've got multiple currents," he says.

They face upstream as they approach the first well because it's too difficult to control the boat when it's moving downstream with the current.

Ayers-Berry pulls up and revs the motor to keep the boat against the platform.

Little climbs up, flips a switch and pushes the start button. The engine whines into action.

Little looks at Ayers-Berry.

"That was like Christmas and your birthday all at once," he says. "We both just started laughing. We couldn't believe it."

The two will spend nine hours on the water and restart eight wells. The electricians restart one of the pumps at Collector Well 4.

The day's work adds some 18 million gallons to the city's pumping capacity.

Lab samples show the water is fine, and Ball, the utilities director, announces Sunday morning, June 15, that capacity is up to 50 percent.

The public is asked to rotate. On even days, people at even-numbered addresses can take short showers and wash minimal laundry. On odd days, people at odd-numbered addresses can have their turn.

Water still is not flowing into the northwest plant.

Monday, June 16, is clear, calm, sunny -- a beautiful day to fly.

A National Guard Chinook helicopter and three pilots have been enlisted to help remove the 800-pound motors from damaged vertical wells along the river. If the motors can be repaired and returned to the wells, the city might be able to restart the northwest water plant.

Boats and lots of electricians are ready to pick up the motors and repair them.

Teams of electricians jump from a boat to well platforms just above the floodwater. They quickly clean controls and replace parts.

When the helicopter arrives, Dan Nunemaker, 40, a project manager at Trey Electric in Swisher, stands alone on the platform, looking up at the 30,000-pound Chinook, an aircraft that can carry 44 soldiers, a howitzer or sections of a bridge.

Chief Warrant Officer Denny Lane, one of the pilots, helps edge the helicopter over the well. The tandem rotors pummel Nunemaker with a 100 mph downdraft. It blasts water everywhere, flings tree limbs around and whips the chain and cable dangling from the helicopter.

"It's the first time I can ever remember getting wet and drying off instantaneously," says Nunemaker, a tall guy with a goatee.

He ducks to avoid the metal connector swinging on the end of the cable.

"That's not going to work," Lane says.

They try to drop the cable into the water and drag it toward the platform. That works.

Nunemaker pulls the cable up and fastens it to the motor. He signals the pilots.

One of the pilots, looking down on Nunemaker and the platform from some 80 feet above, speaks instructions to Lane and the other pilot.

"Forward five. Left one. Come up," Lane remembers the pilot saying. "Up, up."

The chopper slowly lifts the motor and roars away. It takes all day to remove seven motors.

Two electric motor shops -- Hupp and Janda -- clean and repair the motors. Within 24 hours, they are ready to ferry back to the wells.

On Thursday, June 19, those wells are turned on, bringing the northwest water plant back into operation.

Three weeks later, Cedar Rapids' water system is back to 75 percent capacity. Water officials say it will be some time before the system is fully restored, but residents probably won't notice.

The battle to preserve the city's water supply, particularly the night of Thursday, June 12, was even more critical in hindsight than it may have felt to the public at the time.

By Friday, June 13, some 25,000 people had been evacuated from their homes, and more than 15,000 homes and businesses had no electricity.

Interstate 380 was closed to the south. Highway 30 was closed to the east. The city's downtown bridges were closed, most of them under water. Traffic was backed up throughout Cedar Rapids. To the north, the cities of Cedar Falls, Waterloo, Independence and Manchester were dealing with flooding of their own.

Had Collector Well 3 failed, mass evacuations might have been necessary, Linn County Emergency Management Coordinator Rich Mahaney says. Firefighters would have had to haul water from Marion and Hiawatha to put out fires. People would have had to get in line for bottled water at stations around the city.

"Think about the level of tension that would have created," Eyerly says. "As a society, we're not set up to deal with that."

Perhaps worst of all, water would have stopped flowing through the pipes in the water system, creating negative pressure. Contaminated floodwater would have leaked in. The system would have sustained extensive, costly damage. Flushing the system, after repairs, would have taken three weeks.

It happened in Des Moines in 1993 and in Grand Forks, N.D., in 1997.

"That was Mike Lynch's and my nightmare," says Little, the water department maintenance supervisor.

Cedar Rapids' water system avoided that nightmare, by inches, with the help of hundreds of people and some skilled workers.

"The people of Cedar Rapids had a victory," Eyerly says. "It was the one place where we beat the river."