Paul Colletti Denise Mitten with Living Lands and Waters sits in a pile of acorns. Mitten coordinate LL&W's MillionTrees project, planting hardwood trees. More photos from this shoot

"It looked identical," says Tammy Becker, who worked cleanups for both Katrina and the 2008 floods. "Katrina essentially was a flood ... and Cedar Rapids was the same thing, minus the wind damage."

"From our experience, it was definitely the highest concentrated amount of debris we've seen. It's one of those things. It's hard to describe it," Becker says. Even now, months after the initial disaster, she pauses for several seconds to search for words to describe the scene. Finally she finds them. "It's just ... shocking. It was shocking for us. The more we drove up and down the river, you couldn't believe it."

As waters rose, river cleanup pioneer Chad Pregracke and his Living Lands and Waters crew were living on the LL&W barge near St. Louis, Mo., where they'd been sandbagging for weeks.

"It's kind of funny. Sometimes when we're all living on the barge, we can be closed off on what's happening in the outside world," says Becker, education coordinator for LL&W.

"We had heard about the floods in Cedar Rapids, but it was Geoff Manis who had bought a newspaper. He was like 'Chad! Look at this picture!' And it was a photo of the mangled railroad bridge. Chad had no idea how bad it was at the time. In a day or so, Chad drove up there to see it for himself -- to see how bad it was -- and he talked to the fire department and said, 'I can bring the crew.' Three days later, we were there," she says.

For three weeks, the five-member crew and the volunteers it mustered cleaned along the Cedar River's shoreline.

"Every day you would pick up where you left off the day before. We worked our way as far up as we could on our boats," she says. "I have been doing this for six years. Garbage is garbage to us, and you don't have any feelings towards it so much. ... It all kind of looks the same after a while. But in situations like this, when it's the result of a flood, this isn't garbage we're pulling out because someone dumped it into the river. We were picking up furniture from children's bedrooms and wall-hangings with their names on it. You were picking up peoples' lives."

East Moline native Pregracke founded LL&W in 1998. It organizes community river cleanups and workshops, and it plants long-lived trees along river ways, collects acorns and grows oak trees as part of its MillionTrees Project, and encourages groups to "adopt" a stretch of river way to keep it clean.

Though LL&W is an environmental organization -- not a disaster-relief agency -- "in something like this, when we do river cleanup, and when it happened in our own backyard, there is nobody better to get the job done," says Becker. "It was right up our alley."

In addition to its extensive post-flood efforts around the region, the crew still managed regularly scheduled cleanups and events, including the annual XStream Cleanup in the Quad-Cities, in which volunteers collected over 54,000 bags of trash, along with hundreds of thousands of miscellaneous items, including 52,195 tires.

It also planted 6,000 trees along the Illinois, Mississippi and Missouri rivers and collected over 5 tons of acorns for its MillionTrees project.

To more information about Living Lands and Waters, or to volunteer, visit livinglandsandwaters.org or call the office at (309) 496-9848.