It’s all in the numbers:

• More than 1,000 houses cleaned, gutted and, for many, rehabbed.
• More than 10,000 volunteers in the first months following the flood.
• An estimated 167,982 hours of labor donated, with a value of more than $2.6 million.

Even though an estimated 300 to 400 flooded homes in Cedar Rapids still need to be mucked and gutted, the brigades of volunteers have been so numerous and continuous that coordinators are now worried about running out of work for the volunteers.

“We would not be anywhere close to this,” Steve Schmitz, director of the Community Recovery Center in northwest Cedar Rapids, said of the volunteer help that’s poured in. “The volunteers are a crucial part to any recovery process. I think it gives the community a sense of somebody caring for them, and people don’t expect that level of caring from complete strangers.”

Even before the Cedar and Iowa rivers crested last June, volunteers were sandbagging. Then more than 1,200 volunteers from the ecumenical faith group Serve the City group went door to door in Cedar Rapids, telling residents of the rising waters and, eventually, helping them evacuate.

The biggest numbers, however, came in the days that followed.

Large national disaster recovery groups - Hands On Disaster Response, Eight Days of Hope, AmeriCorps/VISTA, faith denominational groups, the American Red Cross, the Salvation Army - started coming and setting up camp wherever they could and working wherever they were needed.

Flood victims needing volunteers to help them, or people wanting to volunteer to help, can call two places: Iowa United Methodist Disaster Volunteer Center, (319) 377-4856; Community Recovery Center, (319) 261-0987.

Janet Hyde came to Cedar Rapids this week from Naperville, Ill., to work on flooded homes. She said her group - 98 high school students and 54 adults - were in Michigan last year when the floods hit Cedar Rapids and Iowa City and decided then its mission trip this year would be to Eastern Iowa.

“We wanted to bring our young people here to help,” she said. “It’s something they feel a real passion about doing.”

Another example: The Iowa United Methodist Church’s disaster volunteer center has more than 5,000 volunteers who’ve offered their assistance from April through August.

Coordinators say, though, that the increasing help coming from state and federal government is replacing some of the need for volunteers, meaning the volunteers will go elsewhere if there’s no work for them in Eastern Iowa.

The Rev. Melisa Bracht-Wagner, the Methodist group’s volunteer coordinator, notes some homeowners have abandoned their flooded homes. If those homeowners would only call, she said, people will clean out their vacant homes. For free.

“There’s that delicate balance of turning the faucet off too soon,” Schmitz said. “There’s a community of individuals throughout the nation that wants to come and work, and if we turn them away that just rifles back through that community.

“We’re trying to be very careful and yet very responsible about the amount of work we have left to do.”