Posted: Sunday, June 15, 2008 12:00 am
JON ERICSON, Courier Staff Writer
During the height of flooding this week in Cedar Falls, the area hardest hit somehow disappeared.
One story emerged - the triumphant efforts of thousands of volunteers to save downtown. Another faded - the plight of thousands of residents north of the river who were in for a nightmare as water closed in on them from several directions.
Words from City Attorney Susan Staudt, who served as city spokeswoman through the disaster, felt like a dagger to many of those who were suffering.
"Our volunteers saved the city," turned into a sound bite, repeatedly shown on television broadcasts both national and local, and fit neatly into newspaper headlines. The quote was meant to address how downtown and its infrastructure was saved, but Staudt said it more than once during an early morning press conference Wednesday.
For many residents of North Cedar, Cedar City and the Lincoln Street area, it felt like they had already been forgotten.
"They didn't save the city. We were out there suffering," said North Cedar resident Art Hesse.
Some of the flood victims of Cedar Falls felt like their story completely disappeared.
Here's how it happened.
As forecasts Tuesday morning showed the Cedar River would rise to potentially catastrophic levels later in the day, areas north of the river started to rapidly be cut off from the outside world.
As Tuesday wore on, thousands of volunteers descended on Cedar Falls in a truly heroic effort to bolster the flood levee.
It was a story well worth telling, but so was the unfolding drama across the river.
The Courier and other media had been in North Cedar and on Lincoln Street for a great deal of time on Monday. Stories detailed the worries of homeowners and businesses and their efforts to prepare for the flood. By Tuesday morning the flood projections changed in a dramatic fashion - the river level was projected to rise to 103 feet on the Cedar Falls scale, nearly 7 feet more than had ever been recorded.
Several Courier staffers, myself included, spent the morning in areas of northern Cedar Falls chronicling rescue efforts and the increasingly desperate attempts of homeowners to save belongings. The Cedar River had already cut off North Cedar's main artery, Center Street, and started to hit areas that had never seen flooding before.
One of our own, Courier Regional Editor Dennis Magee, was probably the last media member to leave North Cedar before all access in or out of the area was blocked by floodwaters. He figures he got out at 1 p.m.
From that point until Thursday morning, there were no media able to get into the flood-ravaged areas. All roads in were blocked by water, although North Cedar residents started to find their way in along Waverly Road on Wednesday night.
The only ones entering or exiting North Cedar on Tuesday night and into Wednesday were National Guardsmen, the fire department and a few residents in private boats.
With the media constrained to one side of the river, the stories, video and pictures getting out were intensely focused on efforts downtown.
At least one national broadcast's coverage consisted solely of the downtown feel-good story and completely ignored the fact that across the river, people were losing their homes.
In the Wednesday Courier, a front page story highlighted the downtown efforts, while Magee's story from North Cedar ran on an inside page. Both sides of the river deserved their own story, and in a perfect world they would have run side by side, but the volume of flood stories from Cedar Falls, Waterloo and other communities prevented that scenario.
I've covered Cedar Falls for a dozen years. As the media spotlight shone on downtown, I knew the stories from north of the river needed to be told. With a staff stretched thin, we made attempts to cold call people in North Cedar to find out what was happening. As we were flooded out of our own office and lost phone service, those efforts became increasingly difficult.
Information coming from the city about North Cedar was sparse and consisted of: road closures, city recommends for people to evacuate the area and that people were being rescued by firefighters and the National Guard.
Media contacts were routed through Staudt, with the mayor doing some interviews.
Staudt and Mayor Jon Crews later told me that was all they knew of the situation across the river. They didn't know exactly where the water had risen. They didn't know if rescues had been dramatic. They didn't know the nature of the damage.
I pleaded with city officials to allow me to join the fire department or guard to get into North Cedar, and I know some television crews did the same. Those requests weren't seriously considered as the roads were unsafe and the rescue crews extremely busy.
Many of the residents of northern Cedar Falls were rescued and taken by bus to emergency shelters at the University of Northern Iowa, where the media was denied access to victims. Once again, the story went untold.
As the week progressed, access into North Cedar and other flooded neighborhoods opened up once again, but by that time most of the media coverage had shifted to ongoing disasters in Cedar Rapids, Iowa City and elsewhere in Iowa.