Winter 2012
Jeanette Anderson didn’t notice hidden flood damage until she had a plumber snake her sewer once, twice, then a third time after the June 2012 flood. Rust-colored water also was running out of her upstairs bathroom faucet. For the first time in 14 years as a homeowner along Duluth’s East First Street, Anderson, 49, was feeling the burden of failing infrastructure.
“I’d never had to have it snaked before,” she said, “then it was three times over a few months.”
A camera scan of her sewer revealed a collapse of the red clay pipes. The home’s water heater was two-thirds full of rust. In the wake of the flood, Anderson steam-cleaned her carpets and diagnosed her home fit.
“I didn’t think there would be damage showing itself in the winter and spring that was just devastating,” she said. “Who knew they made sewers out of red clay?”
Community responds
As the flood waters menaced, the need to knit together relief efforts without overlapping them with inefficiency was
immediate. By the time she was able to make it into work at the Duluth Superior Area Community Foundation, Holly Sampson was met by frenzy in full.
“Just all of a sudden there were phone calls of real panic from non-profit organizations hurt in their physical locations,” Sampson said, describing a network of helpers who were themselves in need of triage. American Indian Community Housing lost transitional housing units. The YWCA lost housing for young mothers. The Salvation Army in Superior was flooded out of its offices.
What happened next owes itself to the lessons learned in oft-flooded locations in southern Minnesota and Cedar Rapids, Iowa, as well as to the ingenuity of the Northland’s own capacity for brainstorming. Philanthropic leaders convened into a Granters’ Alliance. They divided to conquer - the Community Foundation would raise money for the nonprofit sector, the United Way for individuals and families, and the Northland Foundation for the business sector. Working phones like a Wall Street brokerage, the Community Foundation brought together $645,000; the United Way $853,000; the Northland Foundation $364,000.
It was a heroic effort.
“Businesses are often overlooked in recovery, particularly small businesses,” said Erik Torch, the Northland Foundation’s director of grant making. “We wanted to provide quick, flexible, first-in funding to businesses to help them get their doors open and get their employees back to work.”
What Torch and others learned was that even small efforts - a thousand dollars here, a few thousand there - made a world of difference in replacing lost inventory or repairing equipment.
One business owner in Carlton wrote the Northland Foundation to say, “We could not have existed without (a grant).”
“The Northland Foundation helped us stay in business during the disaster,” said a Brookston entrepreneur.
“This grant … gave us hope,” wrote a Barnum hairstylist.
More than one storm
Replacing a water heater and costly repairs to her sewer were more than Jeanette Anderson could bear. A mother of two boys, she was four years removed from a vacationing motorcycle accident in Texas that took her boyfriend’s life as well as her own right leg. She lived on the fixed income of disability insurance. She explained these heartaches as a way of illustrating her mindset when the flood issues with her home were materializing.
“To sort of emphasize how deeply I had suffered and how much of a loss I had already had,” she said.
A regular at the Whole Foods Co-op, she saw first-hand some of the immediate flood impact.
“I was there the next day along with other spectators, watching what happened and seeing how everything just blew out,” Anderson said.
Her home had proven to be a sanctuary in the years since the accident sent her life careening with seven total surgeries and a convalescence that cost her custody of one child. Months after the flood, that sanctuary was failing her, too. All told, repairs would cost $6,000, with $4,500 of that just for sewer repairs.
“That $4,500 was more than I had,” she said.
Bereft again, Anderson’s social worker came to her aid. The worker told Anderson about a philanthropic solution. Ecolibrium3, using money from the United Way drive, was granting money to individuals who were struggling months after the floodwaters receded - the people in Anderson’s shoes.
“It was sort of kismet,” Anderson said. “They saved the day. It was a life-changing event for me.”
Built to serve
To understand how hundreds of thousands of dollars can be galvanized at a moment’s notice, it helps to understand the stories of people like Margaret A. Cargill. The deceased granddaughter of William Cargill, co-founder of the massive Cargill Inc., Margaret lived a life of advantage and exploration. Quietly philanthropic in life, she allowed for a foundation based on her name upon her death in 2006.
“She was a big believer in the importance of disaster relief,” said Margaret A. Cargill Philanthropies spokeswoman Sallie Gaines. “She felt it was work that had to be done and that people in position to help should.
“Relief of human suffering was something she specifically wanted her foundation to address.”
The Eden Prairie, Minn.-based foundation came through for Duluth by funding case workers, who knocked on doors and sought out people hurting from the flood who might have been too proud to ask for help.
That quiet fortitude is one reason why MAC Philanthropies research shows disasters in the Midwest are less likely to receive broad media attention and less likely to receive federal disaster area declarations; it is a fact the Northland learned when it received less federal aid than it requested. It’s also something that’s unlikely to change. Disasters - both natural and man-made horrors, like the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 or other acts of widespread devastation - are more pronounced across the country and the globe. Should federal aid become more and more difficult to procure, state aid will be a more leaned upon commodity. Thus, philanthropic aid, although difficult to accumulate into the millions and billions of dollars, has become a necessary vehicle in providing aid and hope.
In its “thank you” to the Northland Foundation, Duluth’s Whole Foods Co-op Foundation acknowledged the funding, but it ended with this high note, “It was nice to know that someone cared.”
MAC Philanthropies was joined by both the St. Paul and Minneapolis foundations in helping out in short order. Unlike regionalized disasters like hurricanes, mudslides or tsunamis, flood relief is something with which almost any city can empathize. Said one spokesperson reached for this story, “Flooding is a disaster that happens everywhere. It’s indiscriminant.”
Because of its efficiency in securing philanthropic funding, so much of it and so soon, and being able to distribute it so quickly, the Northland’s Granters’ Alliance was welcomed into the Philanthropic Preparedness, Resiliency and Emergency Partnership, or PPREP, in May. PPREP is a two-year roundtable featuring 120 communities throughout the Midwest that will work to establish a sort of “best practices” playbook for flood relief. It’s a far cry from two years ago, when Sampson said, “we had so much to learn about this work.”
Personal recovery
Today, Anderson is confident her home is a sanctuary again. She takes walks using her prosthetic right leg. She likes to walk along Tischer Creek, which exits into Lake Superior through the Glensheen Mansion property.
She’s fascinated by the city’s creeks, including those of the underground variety. She still can survey both the erosion and the progress in equal measure as she goes.
“I’m very aware I was not an isolated case,” she said. “This was a tremendous storm.”
He favorite walk is a part of the Tischer Creek between Wallace Avenue and East Fourth Street. It features paths and bridges funded by Chester Congdon. It is so much a part of the last century that it stirs Anderson’s insides.
“It’s untouched by progress,” she said. “It’s untouched by time.”
