June 9, 2008:Most of the day Monday, Peter R. Teahen sat at the emergency operations center in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, monitoring the grim predictions as they came in. The rain wouldn’t stop. Everything up the river was awash—and it was all heading his way.
Tall and distinguished-looking, with a full head of dark reddish hair, Teahen, 55, ran the funeral parlor business his father started in Cedar Rapids. He was also an experienced emergency worker. As a first-response volunteer and trauma expert for the Red Cross, he had over the years been dispatched to manage 45 major disasters around the world. He was in New Orleans when Katrina hit, was attached to Mayor Giuliani’s staff after 9/11, was a deputy medical examiner at the Oklahoma City bombing, and
had counseled aid workers in Darfur, Sudan, and Sri Lanka. Teahen had also monitored dozens of floods.
But this disaster was different. Cedar Rapids was his hometown, and as the predicted crest height of the coming waters moved ever closer to the top of the city’s 20-foot-high levees, he dreaded the prospect of watching touchstones of his childhood memories get washed away.
Listening to the news reports, he suddenly had an idea. Why wait until after the crest to help people clean up their devastated houses? Why not act now and remove people’s precious goods from the basements and lower floors before the flood sweeps through?
Teahen called his friend, the Rev. Charles “Chuck” Daugherty. An evangelical pastor, Daugherty had been spearheading a group of 44 churches and ministries in Linn County that were determined to put their faith into action by finding ways to help their community. Called Serve the City (servethecity.org), the group lived by its motto: “We serve Christ by serving our city.”
What happened next showed the impact that small churches can have in their communities. As the calendar and the minutes clicked away, they were key players in a race not only against nature, but against the indifference of people reluctant to face reality.
Monday EveningPredicted Crest: 20 FeetThe most vulnerable point in Cedar Rapids was Time Check, an oddly named neighborhood in the lowest-lying part of town. There were nearly 600 homes there. Time Check lay across the river from the landmark Quaker Oats plant and got its name because people could set their watches by the plant’s dependably punctual shift whistle. Now, mostly lower-income, working-class, elderly, and special-needs people lived in the old, modest houses of the somewhat shabby neighborhood. Some lived in basements.
On the northern boundary of Time Check, the swift-moving Cedar River made a sharp bend to the left against the levees shielding the neighborhood. If the river had a mind to jump its banks, Chuck Daugherty knew, this was the first place it would try.
“I need your help,” Teahen told Daugherty over the phone. From the way things looked, there was almost certainly going to be some serious basement flooding, maybe worse, in Time Check. Could Daugherty get people to go house to house, hand out fliers, help move possessions to higher floors, help the older and physically challenged people with whatever they were trying to do in preparation for the flood?
Photos: Carlos Javier Oritz/Rapport
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