Council Pleased With City’s Response To 1,000-Year Storm

A Department of Public Works vehicle blocks traffic into the flooded Menomonee Valley on Aug. 10. Photo by Jeramey Jannene.

The 1,000-year storm that pounded Milwaukee Aug. 9 and 10 caused plenty of tragedy and millions of dollars in damage. But it didn’t foster division within City Hall or a breakdown in city services.

“Often times, people talk about what’s wrong in the city. I think what we’ve seen from both residents helping residents, to all of the staff in the departments going above and beyond is some of the good,” said Alderwoman Milele A. Coggs at Wednesday’s Public Works Committee.

“All around great effort from everyone,” added Ald. Mark Chambers, Jr.

“From my end, it looks like you guys were doing all that you could to work together,” said Ald. Larresa Taylor.

The committee and several department heads spent almost two hours debriefing the committee on the city’s performance in responding to the storm.

“Everybody really pulled together,” said Fire Chief Aaron Lipski.

But while there was plenty to celebrate in the success of inter-department collaboration and the dedication of civil servants working long hours, at least two major issues still loom.

Both the city government and residents will find themselves in dire financial straits without federal assistance from FEMA. The Department of Public Works alone estimates its costs, inclusive of infrastructure damage and cleanup costs, exceed $5.7 million. Countywide, total public infrastructure costs now exceed $50 million.

Lipski said FEMA continues to request figures from the city. There is no timeline for when a decision might be rendered. Data shows President Donald Trump has been slower to approve disaster declarations.

Many residents can’t afford to wait. There are currently 54 homes that are unhabitable and thousands more that sustained damage. Ald. Andrea Pratt said conflicts are already emerging between landlords and tenants in her district about who is responsible for repairs.

Another looming issue is likely to emerge gradually. “Winter is coming,” said Lipski, crediting Department of Neighborhood Services Commissioner Jezamil Arroyo-Vega with first offering the warning.

The issue, the commissioner explained, is that furnaces, commonly located in basements, might have sustained damage in a flood. The equipment could appear fine today, then fail when it’s needed most. Her department, she said, is evaluating what homes need “vital equipment” repairs or replacement to make them safe when cold weather arrives.

Responding To The Storm

Administration officials detailed how the scale of the storm became clearly visible by 1 a.m., and their phones started ringing to coordinate on a response.

Within a 12-hour window, Lipski said the Milwaukee Fire Department received 614 calls for service. “I don’t know that ever we’ve taken that crush for service,” said Lipski. Things got so intense, said the chief, that at one point there were 35 water rescue runs that MFD was unable to respond to. “We literally were arriving hours later to find people standing on the roof of their cars, up to their calves in water.”

He said resources were spread so thin during the storm that he ended up with “two battalion chiefs standing there looking at a burning building with no resources.” Large fires occurred on N. Industrial Road and in Walker’s Point.

With other Milwaukee County communities also besieged by the storm, the countywide service sharing agreement was a nonstarter. Lipski thanked fire departments in Racine and Ozaukee counties for rushing in to help when asked.

“Obviously, the night of the floods, we were completely tapped out,” he said.

The Department of Public Works marshaled its resources the next morning to develop a plan to pick up the pieces.

“There is not a municipality in the world that builds for a thousand year flood,” said Commissioner Jerrel Kruschke. “And if you decided to, there is not enough money to do that.”

But he said the city and Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District‘s investments in green infrastructure helped. “If we wouldn’t have done the things we have done over the past 15 years, it would have been much worse,” he said.

He was effusive in his praise for the DPW staff that worked longer and extra shifts to aid in the cleanup, and the city residents that made it easier.

He said the storm caused DPW alone to rely on 22,000 hours of overtime. Twenty thousand homes received free bulky waste pickup and 28,000 residents took waste directly to one of the two drop-off centers.

“That’s over 11,000 tons of extra material we had to process,” he said of the waste volume.

DPW immediately halted street sweeping to reassign employees. It also eventually paused recycling. But it did catch up and is now back to normal levels operationally.

“I’ve never seen more pride in this department,” he said.

At a press conference, he previously credited the city’s new dispatching system with more efficiently directing resources in the field. Lipski said MFD was also far more organized in its response than during a 2010 storm.

The Milwaukee Health Department was also credited with developing a dashboard to track vital metrics of the cleanup effort and cleanup material giveaways with private partners. Commissioner Michael Totoraitis said surveillance efforts show no uptick in disease cases.

However, all the officials emphasized that more work remains to be done to complete the effort.

“It can be easy to fall into the trope of ‘well, this is all done now.’ We are very much in the thick of it,” said Lipski.