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The storm that spawned it began before the raindrops started falling, gently at first, on the wooded bluffs of southeast Minnesota early last Saturday morning.
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Residents of Minnesota City stand on Bridge Street near the bridge collapse Sunday. (Photo by Melissa Carlo/Winona Daily News) |
It began before victims fought to escape the fury of the ensuing floods Saturday night and into the morning Sunday.
It began before Wayne Dietrich saw water in his girlfriend’s backyard in Stockton and climbed into his car as it rose over the hood.
It began before David Ask phoned a neighbor to say the creek had surged within a foot of his trailer.
It began before Troy Bierly awoke to sirens outside his Goodview home, then spent an hour huddled upstairs with his family before a boat rescued them off their back deck.
The storm that unleashed a deadly deluge on the area began Thursday, when a rare confluence of weather conditions conspired to create the most prolific rain event in Minnesota history.
It fell on the parts of Minnesota and Wisconsin least able to absorb and dispense the water, the coulee region, where roller-coaster topography and loose soil are particularly vulnerable to flash floods and landslides.
The resulting floods killed seven people. Usually tranquil trout streams hammered Stockton, Minnesota City and Goodview. They left Rushford swimming in sewage-tainted water. They sent houses careening down bluffs in Brownsville. They damaged an estimated 1,500 homes and $26 million worth of public infrastructure in Minnesota alone.
The rain started Saturday morning as the first runner crossed the finish line at the Goodview Gallop. What began as a shower turned to torrential downpours, and slick roads slowed traffic to a crawl. In Caledonia, soggy fairgoers scooted between art buildings and barns, avoiding the muddy puddles on the dirt roads.
It wasn’t until after sundown that the potential of the storm started to become evident.
Recipe for disaster
WCCO-TV meteorologist Paul Douglas said he began fretting about the prospect of a flood earlier in the week. On Friday night, he predicted that southern Minnesota might “go from drought to flood” over the weekend.
“They looked at me like I had three eyes,” Douglas said. “Nobody in their right mind predicts 15 or 16 inches of rain. But Friday, it looked like a number of elements were coming together.”
State climatologist Greg Spoden said moisture from Tropical Storm Erin coupled with 90-degree heat was pressing north Friday and Saturday from Iowa and Missouri. Meanwhile, a high-pressure system over the Great Lakes that created 60-degree temperatures here refused to budge.
The tug-of-war parked the weather system over Southeast Minnesota and western Wisconsin, which Spoden said is a typical precursor to sustained, heavy rainfall.
“Usually when you have these storms, you end up with a boundary that doesn’t want to move, and you end up with moisture and warmth being brought across that boundary,” Spoden said.
As the rainfall continued Saturday, it tumbled fast down the region’s steep, narrow gullies into creeks and rivers.
Mark Krunz, of the Winona County Soil and Water Conservation District, said the region’s topography and its shallow, erodible soils — coupled with a deluge of rain — formed the perfect recipe for flash floods and mudslides.
“The water can really come roaring out of those areas,” Krunz said. “Until it’s given the opportunity to spread out over wider ground, it’s gonna run deep, and it’s gonna run fast.”
The flood begings
The National Weather Service issued flash flood warnings for Winona and Houston counties at 7:36 p.m. Saturday.
Douglas said forecasters were observing a pattern called a “train echo effect.” It happens when the proper conditions move a powerful storm through an area, then repeatedly press rewind. Douglas said has seen the pattern once every two or three years in Minnesota — but never to this extent.
“It’s much like the cars in a train passing over the same track,” Douglas said. “Each wave of thunderstorms is dumping 1 to 2 inches of rain. But if you have six or eight of these waves, then you end up with ungodly amounts of rain.”
Two hours after the flood warnings, at 9:48 p.m., mudslides were reported at Houston near Money Creek.
By 10:30 p.m., the Minnesota office of Homeland Security and Emergency Management was notified of “significant flooding” in Winona, Houston and Fillmore counties.
At first, reports to the Winona County Sheriff’s Department were concentrated in the Stockton area. The Winona County Dive Rescue Team mobilized there, where it would work through the night and rescue 15 people using an inflatable raft.
At about that time, Wayne Dietrich was checking on his girlfriend’s house in Stockton. A little before 10 p.m., he saw water in the yard and decided it was time to go.
The 62-year-old retired TRW worker drove about half a block. Then he realized floodwaters were up to the windshield of his Buick LeSabre. The car wasn’t steering well and felt like it was being swept away.
His doors lock automatically, and if the water shorted out the car, he’d be trapped.
“I thought I was dead,” Dietrich said.
But he was able to open the window and climb out of the car, he said. Dietrich said he walked about half a block through chest-deep water before finding shelter at a local bar. He later got a ride to his Minnesota City home, which was untouched by the floods.
In Houston, David Ask called his neighbor around 12:30 a.m. and said Storer Creek was within a foot of his trailer but it seemed to be receding, so he said he would stay.
Minutes later, his neighbor called back and the phone line was dead. Neighbors found his body Sunday morning, about a mile and a half downstream. Pieces of his trailer were scattered along the creek bottom.
Ask, 55, was one of seven victims the flood would claim before sunrise.
Damage mounts
By 1:30 a.m., evacuated residents from Elba and Stockton were moving to Red Cross shelters and the Minnesota National Guard began to mobilize.
Garvin Brook, which had already ravaged Stockton, became a roiling river as it raced down the valley into Minnesota City and Goodview, all the while gaining volume and momentum.
Watersheds throughout the region were being similarly overwhelmed.
A mobile home park was evacuated in La Crescent around 2:30 a.m. as the Root River continued to rise higher than it had in 47 years.
In Fillmore County, Rush Creek punched through a dike at Rushford around 3 a.m., submerging two-thirds of the city’s homes, its sewage plant and its entire business district.
But it was Garvin Brook that wreaked havoc over the largest area.
While some of the floodwater stayed in Garvin Brook and ripped through Minnesota City, a portion split off along Highway 61, flattening parts of Goodview and swelling Lake Goodview. Much of that water remained in the bloated lake six days later.
Bill Huber, hydrologist with the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources, said the Goodview flooding was one of the storm’s most unpredictable twists.
“That was the surprising part,” Huber said. “It didn’t follow the valley to the Mississippi.”
The detour put Goodview residents like Troy Bierly squarely in harm’s way.
At about 4:30 a.m., Bierly heard sirens outside his home in the Sunny Acres subdivision. When he walked out into the darkness, he noticed the floodwaters had turned Cindy Drive into a canal.
By the time he returned from talking to a neighbor, the waters had risen to his garage door.
Bierly rushed inside, shepherded his wife and daughter to the second floor, and slammed the front door shut.
The water “pushed the door right through the jam,” he said.
More than an hour passed before a boat full of Goodview firefighters lifted the family from their back deck.
Like most residents in the new, upscale Sunny Acres subdivision and the rest of the region, Bierly had no flood insurance.
“I don’t even know where to begin,” he said while sorting through the muddy remnants of his garage.
In the coming weeks, Bierly’s son is scheduled to visit the family before being deployed to Iraq.
“Welcome home,” Bierly said.
Lives are lost
By 6:15 a.m., state officials realized local responders needed help. Emergency management crews were dispatched from St. Paul, in part to streamline increasingly chaotic communication between cooperating agencies.
Reports started to circulate about fatalities. Six were recorded that night; a seventh was confirmed Tuesday when searchers found the body of Jered Lorenz, 37, in Rush Creek, four miles south of the Enterprise rest area on Interstate 90.
At 6:21 a.m. Sunday, first responders found the bodies of Victor and Joyce Gensmer near their home in Witoka. Victor, 79, was driving his wife, Joyce, 67, to work in Winona when their Jeep fell about 30 feet into a chasm that rushing water had opened on County Road 17.
One victim died a hero: David Blackburn, a 37-year-old father of four, drowned on Highway 6 near La Crescent after helping his wife, Dawn, to safety.
John Micheel worked for 37 years with the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s conservation service, where he drew up flood control measures for Garvin Brook. John, 67, and his wife, Shirley, 66, were headed home to Lewiston when their car was swept off County Road 23 near Stockton. A coworker described the creek as a “thief in the night” that snuck up on one of the people who knew it best.
By sunrise Sunday, survivors had begun to find shelter. At Saint Mary’s University, Red Cross volunteers were treating and feeding about 390 residents.
Others were still getting the flood’s full brunt.
By 8 a.m., Lake Goodview had risen noticeably and was still taking on water. It ultimately flooded 150 apartments and forced 300 residents from their homes.
In Rushford, levees designed to protect the city were holding it prisoner, preventing water from draining out of the business district.
As late as midmorning, crews still were working to evacuate houses.
By that time, observers had begun to flock to flood locations particularly in Minnesota City and Goodview, where the action was still intense. Some, like Jerry Burch, stayed clear of emergency workers, but couldn’t resist watching history in the making.
“It used to be a little creek you could jump across,” he marveled, looking down at Garvin Brook. “Now, it’s 100 feet wide.”
White picket fences and swing sets floated past in the bubbling brown water. A house teetered on the edge of a cliff, where the water had washed away back yards hours earlier.
Burch could only shake his head in shock.
“There’s nothing you can do about it,” Burch said. “Mother Nature — you’re at its mercy.”
The final toll
Storms don’t often shock Paul Douglas.
He recalled the 1987 “superstorm” that dumped a foot of rain on the Twin Cities in just seven hours.
But he likened the weekend storms to the equivalent of a category 5 hurricane. “That really is what the Winona area got,” Douglas said. “A major, catastrophic hurricane’s worth of rain."
The results rewrote Minnesota history.
In Hokah, 15.1 inches of rain fell from 8 a.m. Saturday to 8 a.m. Sunday. That shattered the previous state 24-hour rainfall record, set in 1972, by more than four inches.
National Weather Service meteorologist Jeff Boyne said an unofficial but reliable gauge recorded more than 17 inches of rain in that time near Witoka.
“We’ve never had this type of rainfall before in such a short period of time,” said Daryl Buck, a technician with the Winona County soil and water conservation district.
After a flood of catastrophic proportion in the book of Genesis, God promised Noah, “Never again will there be a flood to destroy the earth.”
Douglas hopes a similar bargain will be struck with southeast Minnesota.
“It probably will come as little consolation, but the odds of this being repeated in our lifetime are slim to no,” Douglas said.
As survivors continued picking through the remains of their homes and possessions Friday, the clouds cleared, revealing the first blue sky in a week.
At last, there was no rain in sight.
To help or get help
Winona Daily News has created a href“http://winonanet.com/shared-content/phpBB/index.php?c11“> an online flood recovery bulletin board /a> with comprehensive information on how to get n and give n help as well as the latest updates on road closures, cleanup progress and instructions.
Kevin Behr, Amber Dulek, Chris Hardie, Chris Hubbuch, Britt Johnsen, and Ryan Stotts contributed to this story.
