“A few weeks ago, on a Friday, we got a mission to go help the city of Spencer start their cleanup, and it’s a mess. And anybody that remembers the tornado and the derecho, we lived it,” McLain said. “Well, they were struggling, as we did, with the tornado. How do we separate debris? What’s that look like? How do we get information to the public?”

From there, McLain reached out to Marshall County Emergency Management Coordinator Kim Elder for guidance, and although she happened to be on vacation at the time, she passed the message along to Acting Marshalltown Fire Chief Christopher Cross.

“Within 10 minutes, I had documents in hand that I could give to the city of Spencer — here you go, change the name of the city, and we can go to work,” McLain said. “So I just want to acknowledge Chris on the outstanding support (and) the help. The city’s struggling. They are making serious headways and significant improvements. But without a little bit of help from sister cities, they wouldn’t be in the same shape they’re in now.”

Paying it forward

An American flag stands strong in the wreckage of a Spencer home after the community of approximately 11,000 residents endured catastrophic flooding in late June.

Because of the information Cross provided, McLain said they were able to move approximately 30,000 cubic yards of debris in four days and separate them properly, which drew a round of applause from the audience at the meeting. Cross, who joined the MFD as deputy fire chief in 2016 and assumed the acting/interim title after David Rierson retired earlier this year, said he had never been involved in a major disaster recovery effort in his career prior to the tornado.

“Natural disasters have different phases, obviously. There’s the alarm phase and the response phase when you start to do things to try to stabilize the city or people out in the city. You stabilize them to stop the forward progress of the badness, then you morph in from the alarm phase of the response phase to the recovery. And then after recovery, everything is rebuilt and we prepare for the next one,” he said.

For Mayor Joel Greer, a Spencer native who still has family living there, the situation is especially personal.

“I am profoundly proud of our Marshalltown firefighters volunteering to help my hometown of Spencer immediately after its worst flood in a century! While the victims certainly appreciated the professional help, they probably did not appreciate that our local crew wins the statewide stair-climbing contest about every year that it is held,” Greer said. “Spencer’s mayor and his wife were classmates and friends of mine since grade school, and my little brother’s office off of the Main Street was flooded badly, so this one literally hit close to home. Marshalltown certainly appreciated the outpouring of help after our tornado, so it is nice to see that type of help just got paid forward.”

Putting together a team

The water was so high in Spencer after the floods that first responders used boats as their primary method of traveling through town.

As Cross recalled, former City Administrator Jessica Kinser assembled a team that included himself, Police Chief Mike Tupper and former Housing and Community Development Director Michelle Spohnheimer to lead on operational recovery and help departments within the city that were “stricken” and “mired down in the volume of things they needed to accomplish.”

One of the results was the creation of a vegetative and construction debris removal plan, which Cross said he had no experience with at that time.

“But it really wasn’t necessarily about my area of expertise. It was like the administrative function power that we all had together as we were negotiating this problem,” he said.

The leadership group held several meetings at the Marshalltown Public Library and then worked on putting the debris removal plan into action.

“It’s a big long plan that deals with everything about the grand topic of debris removal. Not only did we have to figure out the best accepted practice to be able to do a large scale debris removal management project in the city. We had to make sure that we had a place to put it all, so we ended up getting with the landfill leadership, talking with them about what their capacity was, what their reserve capacity is at the landfill (and) if they were willing to take some of their regulations and bend them for us,” he said. “So we worked it out with them. We kind of figured out what their capacity was, and they have a whole ‘nother landfill section that’s in reserve if this one is totally encumbered.”

Fast forward six years, and officials from Spencer reached out to Elder about obtaining documents to inform the public on how debris should be sorted — as McLain noted, it actually makes a huge difference in terms of Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) compliance and reimbursement. Elder, in turn, connected with Cross, who had just returned from a vacation, and shortly thereafter, he was at his office digging through files to find the entire plan.

Before long, the needed documents had landed in the right hands on the other side of the state.

“This is what we do. I’m plugged into the network of state fire chiefs, and we ping each other for information all the time. We’ll take a document for fire department X and put our name on it, and it’s just kind of what we do,” Cross said. “We’re just doing our part, man. We’re supporting people when they need it most… I just want to do whatever it takes to help people.”

McLain added that FEMA representatives, when they arrived on scene, were “amazed” at the work that had already been done.

“We were real smart in our foresight,” he said. “We’ve learned our lessons over the last 15 years of how to do it correctly because most times, cities will do it wrong and they’ll suffer for it because FEMA has rules,” he said. “Well, this way, they’re going to get 100 percent reimbursement for everything… If you do it wrong, they get nothing, and you’re talking somewhere in the neighborhood of a million to a million and a half dollars. They have to fork it out themselves. Well, you can’t do that to small town Iowa.”

Help is never far away

In short, Iowans — and emergency responding agencies in Iowa — are one big family, and help is only one call away.

“In suffering, you develop strength and clarity, and then you can provide that support and assistance and strength and clarity for other people when they are in it,” Cross said. “And it’s awesome.”