Flood damage worse than thought in some areas

More than a week after the ice-choked Milwaukee River swamped northern Ozaukee County river towns, residents and communities are putting themselves back together.

But Fireman’s Park in Newburg won’t be one of them.

The initial estimate was that it would cost about $50,000 to restore the park.

  “After giving it some more thought, $50,000 was extremely light,” said Ken Mayer, treasurer of the Newburg Fire Department, a private corporation that owns the park. “It’s probably more like $100,000 to rebuild it as it was.”

The ballpark’s outfield fence was destroyed, the concession stand was damaged, the parking lot and driveway were undermined and largely washed away, along with picnic tables and benches.

This is the third year in a row the park has flooded — it sustained $20,000 damage in 2017 — and department officials are reticent to put anymore money back into it.

“At this point there are more questions than answers. But I can’t see spending a lot of money and potentially having it happen again next year or, even if we’re lucky, three years from now,” Mayer said.

The loss of the baseball fields and concession stand means that the usual 40-some games won’t be played there by the youth baseball teams and their 60-some ballplayers will have to find somewhere else to play.

To help, the Fredonia youth baseball league has offered its fields to the Newburg league.

“They are truly great neighbors,” Newburg Baseball League Coordinator Casey Holbrook said. The league is operated by the fire department.

“Our main source of fundraising is the concession stand,” Holbrook said. “We sell lots of burgers and brats and refreshments. It’s our sole source of income, other than league fees. It’s a substantial loss.”

The concession stand also generates funds for the fire department during other events, including its annual Newburg Picnic held the first weekend in June each year.

“Our main fundraiser is the Newburg picnic. Essentially that park is maintained by that concession stand,” Mayer said.

Mayer said the department still hopes to have the picnic this year, making it a priority to repair the parking lot and driveway.

“The main thing is to address the blacktop and parking lot. It washed away a ton of dirt and gravel,” he said.

“The park is a central part of Newburg. We want to see it back where it was but financially we have to make some more decisions,” Mayer said. 

Two community clean-up days will be held at the park on Saturdays, April 6 and April 13. The clean-ups begin at 8 a.m. but volunteers can join any time during the day, Mayer said. Volunteers are asked to bring tools such as rakes, shovels and wheelbarrows.

“Our hope is we can restore the park to its orginal state, but we have to make sure we can fix the root of the problem,” he said, meaning, why is the park flooding when it didn’t before?

What changed?

Residents point to the fact that the Newburg dam was removed in 2012 and flooding has become more common since then.

Did the park ever flood before the dam was removed?

“Not to my recollection,” Holbrook said. “I don’t recall the (baseball) fields ever flooding.”

The Newburg dam was demolished in 2012 to open 37 miles of the Milwaukee River for the first time since the mid-1800s to allow the passage of fish and other aquatic life from the Bridge Street dam in Grafton to the Barton dam in West Bend.

According to the Ozaukee County government website, benefits of removing the dam included “improved water quality, kayak/canoe recreational passage, re-established floodplain” and others.

That part about “re-established floodplain” is what troubles some people.

“I wouldn;t agree particularly with that (theory),” said Andrea Stern, a DNR dam safety engineer.

“We’ve just had increased rainfall in the area that is contributing to the flooding. Whether the dam held back some of the ice could be a factor. It would take further study to figure out what is contributing to the flooding,“ she said.

The dam was built to create a mill pond to generate power to drive the turbine in a mill. It was not built to control flooding, Stern said.

Ozaukee County Emergency Management Director Scott Ziegler said it’s difficult to know why the park has flooded in each of the past three years.

“I know that Newburg in the last three years has experienced ice jams in the exact same place” near an island in the river, he said. “The problems we experienced this year had more to do with the level of the river and the way the ice broke up.”

Flooding of the park is likely to occur in the future, Stern said.

“That area is within a flood plain. It will flood occasionally,” she said. “I don’t think they predicted it to flood as often as it does. But the park being in the flood plain is an allowable use because damage isn’t usually that great.”

As for how the flooding in Newburg affeted downstream communities, Ziegler said it was unrelated.

Workers in Newburg “initially tried to release that jam but very quickly changed to an effort to save their sewage lift station and protect their sanitary sewer system and water treatment facility from further damage,” he said.  

“So what happened in Waubeka? That came from other ice on the river east of Newburg that got caught up in the Waubeka area and hit the bridge. It wasn’t a cascading event. These were events that just happened on their own.”

Ice that was released in Waubeka was held up near Waubedonia Park and when that released and flowed south, Saukville experienced more flooding on Mill Street and Highway W.

As for lessons learned from the experience: 

“I think we probably need to make some improvements in our communication out to the residents,” Ziegler said.

“We rely on local communities but everybody does it a little different. Cities and villages kind of make the call on that,” he said.

He said that will be a topic at meetings in the next few days between county and municipal staffs.

Meetings with state officials also are planned to discuss clean-up of the river and public lands.

Private landowners are responsible for the clean-up on their properties, Ziegler said. He suggested they contact their local municipality to see what services are available.

Some churches and other groups will likely offer assistance, he said.

Ziegler said the county has received “some sporadic calls about residents not physically or financially able to clean up. I thought we’d have more.”

Ziegler said the damage caused by the flood wasn’t high enough in terms of dollars or numbers of people affected to qualify for state or federal aid. 

“We didn’t come close in this case. We’re way off. There’s no potential” for assistance, he said.

Ziegler said private and philanthropic grants could become available later “but we haven’t heard anything.”

No agricultural losses from the flood were reported, Stephanie Plaster with Ozaukee County University of Wisconsin-Extension office said.

Ziegler and other officials suggested homeowners with wells have their water tested.