A newspaper based in Iowa devastated city of Cedar Rapids is reporting that a fundraising arm for nonprofit organizations is using its normally placid call center as an emergency response facility to help area residents displaced by yesterday’s floods.

 

According to The Gazette, officials from the “Hawkeye Area Community Action Program, Foundation 2” are staffing the United Way’s 211 hotline alongside trained volunteers.

 

The phones at the center are ringing constantly, reports The Gazette’s Alicia Ebaugh, and the people answering those phones are volunteers seeking to aid flood victims or someone who needs a place to sleep.

 

“One lady who called me was being evacuated, and she had never done anything like this before,” operator Michele Lerch said, according to the Gazette. “She was just in tears. She had nowhere to go.”

 

Typically a place where operators field health and human services calls, the call center has been transformed into a disaster response hot line for 24 counties in Eastern Iowa, according to Ebaugh. Operators are taking calls on where to get sandbags, whom to call to pick up a pet from a flooded home and whether the Federal Emergency Management Agency was in town yet, she reports.

 

Calls – normally about 300 per day – are coming in the thousands now, Ebaugh says.

 

According to the Associated Press, rising water from the Cedar River forced the evacuation of a downtown hospital Friday after residents of more than 3,000 homes fled for higher ground. A railroad bridge collapsed, and 400 city blocks were under water, the AP is reporting.

 

Cedar Rapids was the hardest-hit city in Iowa, the AP says, where Gov. Chet Culver declared 83 of the state's 99 counties as state disaster areas and nine rivers were at or above historic flood levels. Elsewhere in the upper Midwest, rivers and streams tipping their banks forced evacuations, closed roads, and even threatened drinking water, according to the news service.

 

The Gazette is reporting that Cedar Rapids city employees and police staffing the city flooding hot line at (319) 286-5770 are also at the United Way call center, examining flood plain maps and reading evacuation orders to panicked callers.

“In the worst of possible circumstances, we’re playing an important role in answering questions in order to keep emergency lines open,” Mitch Finn, HACAP deputy executive director, told Ebaugh.