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 Evening
Predicted Crest: 20 Feet
The 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
Daugherty said he’d try, and started firing out e-mails to each pastor partner in the group’s network.

One church, Pastor Jim Coyle’s Ellis Community congregation, a tiny, one-story converted residence, was already an integral part of Time Check. It was the ideal place to stage the operation. “Meet at Ellis Community, corner of 6th and L, N.W. Tuesday, June 10, 8 a.m.,” Daugherty’s e-mail read.

Down deep he believed that if the river topped the levees, it would take more than volunteers in hip waders to save lives. It would take God’s intervention.

Tuesday Morning
Predicted Crest: 22.1 Feet
More than 350 people descended on the small Ellis Community Church. Pastor Coyle was forming them into teams, designating a leader for each, equipping them with “Are You Ready to Evacuate?” fliers, taking down cell phone numbers to maintain contact, and sending them out.

Aside from being a pastor, the fit, compact 50-year-old Coyle was also a mental health expert, one of only two ministers in the country certified by Homeland Security to serve as a disaster chaplain. He held advanced degrees in crisis management and, like Peter Teahen, had been called to New York after 9/11 and to New Orleans for Katrina. He knew how these nightmares unfolded. The only chance for minimizing destruction was to try to stay one step ahead.

Although he lived on higher ground in a more affluent part of town, Coyle was particularly concerned about the needy in the low-lying Time Check neighborhood. He had bought his church building there in 2005 and built up a congregation of about 50 people by preaching the Gospel and meeting practical needs. If people weren’t getting food, he fed them. If they needed clothes, he clothed them. He had been trying to make a difference, and now his people were facing disaster.

To make matters worse, Time Check residents were ignoring the threat. With the water level still several feet below the raised 20-foot levee a few blocks away, most residents seemed unconcerned. Over and over, the Serve the City volunteers heard, “We were here for ’93. How bad can this be?”

The Great Flood of 1993 was a benchmark.  It was then that the Missouri and Mississippi rivers, and most of their tributaries, swelled up to drown 320,000 square miles of the heartland and cause $15 billion worth of destruction. It was the worst natural disaster in U.S. history at that time. Because Cedar Rapids was north of where those two mighty rivers meet in St. Louis, the city rode out ’93 relatively unharmed. The surge peaked at 19.4 feet. There was some water and flooded basements in Time Check, but nothing catastrophic.  Why would this one be any worse?

Brent Watkins, a pastor at River of Life Church (riveroflife.org), was with a team dispatched from Ellis. He helped one woman put her ground-floor furniture up on cinder blocks. Then he approached an elderly woman who was sitting in a lawn chair in her backyard; the land ran right down to the water.

“Excuse me, ma’am,” he said, introducing himself. “Are you going to be leaving?”

“Oh, I don’t think so,” she said. “The worst we ever had was in ’93, and that was up to here.” She pointed to a spot on her driveway. “That was 19.5 feet. Now they say maybe this will be 21.5,” she said, indicating a spot halfway up her garage. “That’s no problem. I don’t care about that.”

And so it went, house by house.

Wendy Barton, a woman in her late 50s, was in the process of moving across town into her late mother’s Time Check house. Over the previous weeks, she had managed to get almost all of her belongings into her mother’s basement. The pastor from the Hus Presbyterian Church (huschurch.org) in her old neighborhood was among the ministers who had come to Ellis, and he suspected she was now in need of assistance. Her mother’s house was five short blocks from the surging.
When the pastor, Terry Van Wyk, arrived, he found Wendy, her son, and a friend frantically hauling all of her belongings out of the basement and stacking them on the ground floor of the one-story house. There was nowhere higher up to go besides a small crawl-space attic. And Wendy had already filled it with the quilts and paintings her artistic mother had left her, the only treasure she owned.
 
Workmen rang the doorbell to say that, for safety reasons, they had shut off the gas. Wendy broke down crying, and the pastor called Jim Coyle to pass along this latest sign of impending disaster. Within 30 minutes, 11 more volunteers had been sent to help Wendy and were moving her televisions, clothes, furniture, and boxes upstairs. .
 
Tuesday Afternoon
Predicted Crest: 22.5 Feet
Throughout the day, Van Wyk felt his faith shoring him up and keeping him focused and calm. Everyone was operating in silent prayer. They weren’t there to share their faith in words. They were there to share their faith by showing the love of Christ in their actions.

As predictions of the crest inched higher throughout the day, teams combed the neighborhood readying for the worst. Realizing they needed a command center on higher ground, Charles Daugherty set up phones and computers in the Central Church of Christ, out of the flood zone. Again, he sent out pleas: They needed more people. The first battalion was getting tired from the backbreaking work of moving furniture and possessions.

A team from First Lutheran (firstlutherancr.org) answered the call. The church had completed a 40-day Purpose Driven seminar, and pastor Tom Pietz said it helped prepare them to serve in emergencies like this one. Going house to house, a member of the congregation, Barb Hanson, saw people mowing their lawns as if nothing was going to happen. The most common reaction to her warnings was, “I’m not moving. Thank you for the information.” It seemed to some volunteers that the warnings were as nonchalantly ignored as in Noah’s time.

Wednesday Morning
Predicted Crest: 24.7 Feet
The ranks of volunteers swelled, and so did the river. At three in the morning the order came to evacuate the Czech Village, another low-lying neighborhood downstream from Time Check. At dawn Chuck Daugherty was frantically sending out e-mails looking for more help, particularly people with vans and trucks. The city and county offices, which sat on an island in the center of the river, were abandoned.

Just before 9:00 a.m. word came through the command center that they were going to lose Time Check. Mandatory evacuation orders were given. Teahen called Daugherty again, this time with an urgent plea. “People are going to die tomorrow if we don’t go in again and get them out.”

Daugherty worried that this might be too much to expect of his Serve the City volunteers. It was way beyond his group experience. But then he remembered: Who does anything on their strength alone? 

The volunteers hit the streets with a new message: We want you to get out because we want you to live!—and this time they got a different response from residents. People were evacuating.

Marcie Watson, the soft-spoken and grandmotherly director of spiritual formation at the First Lutheran Church, was humbled by the bravery and acceptance she saw in some of the people she helped abandon their homes, knowing they might never be back. As residents ran back and forth from house to vehicle, throwing armloads of whatever they could lift, she and her team would join in, filling garbage bags they had brought along. One woman kept chanting over and over, “Thank you, thank you, thank you so much. I never thought I’d get so much of my stuff out.”

But still, not everyone was willing to leave. An elderly couple with a dog were parting ways. The woman was getting out, but the man insisted he and the dog would just go up to the second floor and be fine. That’s how he rode out ’93, he said. The two of them would be just fine. Marcie’s group took note of his address to give to rescuers later.  

With his short-cropped dark hair and athletic build, Brian Fink looks like the cop and SWAT team member he once was. Now a pastor at River of Life ministry in Cedar Rapids, he led a group of volunteers through a section of Time Check. The first houses they came across were already empty. At another house two young women were cursing and heckling people. Fink asked them if they needed any help. Help? They didn’t need any help, they said in so many colorful words.
“Well, I am a pastor of a local church,” Fink said, “and if you don’t need any help, is it all right if I pray for you?”

The two young women were taken aback. They stopped swearing and told him, Sure, go right ahead and pray for us.

Fink bowed his head and prayed. When he looked up, both women were crying. “God met us,” Fink says. He and his team moved on to the next house.

Police were increasingly showing up to enforce the mandatory evacuation. Fink got a call asking him to report to the command center and, because of his police background, start acting as liaison with law enforcement. Experts had begun calling this a “500-year flood.” And there were 2,000 homes at risk in various neighborhoods. Each family had to be warned—door to door.

Local television was broadcasting the Serve the City hot- line number, and Jim Coyle was being swamped with volunteers. Serve the City had become the go-to group for all volunteer issues. Some were now being sent to shelters to work side by side with the Red Cross.  

Coyle put all of his disaster relief experience and training to work orchestrating the volunteers. Fink, backing him up, began running the operation like a police station—responding, processing, assigning. Reports were already coming in that some volunteers were wading through waist-high pools to reach homes. Fink told his teams, “We leave it to you to decide how far you go. Don’t go beyond what you’re sure you can handle physically.”

Pastor Tom Pietz of the First Lutheran Church was leading a team through the neighborhood when word came that everyone, including volunteers, had to get out. Water was now coursing through the streets.

Following police orders, Pietz and his team were just about to leave the area when they heard a call from down the road: “Over here!” It was a household less than a block from the river. The family was frantic. Pietz and his team disobeyed the police, rushed over, and blitzed the house, hauling out everything the people wanted moved. The family had a brand-new pickup truck at the curb, the price tag still on, and the team helped them load it and get their belongings to higher ground.

At the same time, Jim Coyle heard the inevitable. He had to evacuate his church. The move was done quickly, and Jim took one last look at the little church he had opened two-and-a-half years earlier and loved.  

It touched Coyle’s heart to see so many people come together and do such phenomenal work. Daugherty and his group had worked a decade to build a team to serve, and that volunteer corps had now grown to more than 2,000 people. Astonishing. He’d never seen things come together like that in any of the many disaster zones he had served in. It had to be the Lord’s work. .
 
Thursday Morning
Predicted Crest: 32 Feet
When Thursday dawned, Cedar Rapids was without power and down to the last of its 16 water pumps. Within hours, the river exploded over the city at a crest of 31.1 feet, a full 20 feet above flood level, inundating 1,300 city blocks over nine square miles and chasing 24,000 of the city’s 120,000 residents from their homes. Time Check was flooded up to the rooftops and in some spots beyond. People should have died. But no one did.

Chuck Daugherty insists that everyone in Time Check survived because the church volunteers, police force, and other workers pulled together. Pastor Brent Watkins agrees but adds that in his faith there are no coincidences. If anyone but Peter Teahen had been working with the Red Cross that first day, no one would have called Serve the City. If Jim Coyle had not chosen the Time Check neighborhood to set up his ministry, then the volunteer network would not have benefited from the leadership of a veteran disaster manager. Had Daugherty and his fellow ministers not decided to form a network of people geared up to serve, the response could easily have fallen short. The Red Cross had nowhere near the manpower the churches did.

“Coincidence?” Watkins says. “That’s like you fall out of an airplane, an angel appears, scoops you up, puts you on the ground, and you call it a coincidence.”

As Peter Teahen puts it, people had to go door to door and look people in the eye and say: “We want you to leave because we want you to live.” Without that person-to-person contact, there would have been a very large death toll.

Sunday
Water Level Receding
As a chaplain with FEMA, Jim Coyle had been on the scene of many disasters and knew that floods deliver the longest- lasting impact. The cleanup is tedious. There’s mold and disease and infections. So, Serve the City volunteers continued to offer counseling and hand out drinking water and clean-up kits.

Block after block of mud-soaked furniture and belongings piled along the curbs. In all, 10,000 people were chased from their Time Check homes, many of which would be condemned and await the bulldozer. Pastor Terry Van Wyk took a drive through Time Check and came to Wendy’s house. She was there cleaning up, wearing a face mask, gloves, and boots and so covered with muck that you couldn’t tell what color clothes she had on. But she had good news. All of her mother’s stuff—the paintings and quilts and albums and knickknacks that Wendy had gotten up into the crawl space had been spared.

Wendy stood in the devastation and stretched her arms into the air in praise. TVs and couches can be replaced, but not family treasures. She looked up toward the heavens and called out, “Thank you, God!”