Tom Mattox’s home is a showstopper. The lawn is perfectly manicured. There are flowers of all kinds dotting the yard, almost daring you to find an unflattering angle. He says that’s what neighbors notice the most — the flowers.
But a little over 10 years ago, the house was in distress. Mattox’s basement on 30th and Meinecke was flooded out.
“I remember trying to go downstairs but there was water everywhere,” Mattox says. “I lost a lot that day.”
Mattox says FEMA came out, made an estimation and there was a drainage pipe that was replaced. Ultimately, the water went down.
“They paid me for my stuff,” Mattox says. “But ... you have some of my grandparents’ stuff that … the water got to it. That type of stuff, you know, sentimental value, you can't recover.”
In July 2010, Milwaukee County declared a state of emergency after flash flooding from heavy rainfall led to approximately 2,000 calls for basement flooding.
That history, and the studies that came out of it, fueled a collaboration between graduate students from UWM’s School of Freshwater Sciences and Wisconsin’s Department of Natural Resources this past spring. The students’ objective was clear: examine flooding risks in the state and highlight what’s being done about it.
Collaborating to find solutions
“Flooding is the most common and most costly natural disaster in the state of Wisconsin,” says Joe McCormack, UWM graduate student. “And with the effects of climate change, it's expected that more frequent and severe storms are going to increase the amount of flood damage that takes place.”
The Water Consulting class pairs students with clients to work directly with industry professionals to gain real-world experience.
The students took a lot of inspiration from two local organizations in particular — Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District, or MMSD, and Groundwork Milwaukee. The students said that Metcalfe Park and the parallel 30th Street corridor were important to study for a number of reasons, including their landscapes, which make them a natural flood risk.
Evelyn Grimm pointed out the number of impervious surfaces in urban areas, like lots of hard and flat surfaces, parking lots, abandoned buildings, as well as little tree cover or green areas to capture rainwater. In the city of Milwaukee, over 45% of the city’s overall surfaces are considered “impervious.”
But the students all pointed to work being done to combat these issues by the city and its partners.
“Infrastructure is really costly to fix over time,” Grimm says. “So to combat that, [they’ve] implemented green infrastructure such as bioswales.”
Grimm looked into MMSD and three bioswales they built along the 30th Street Corridor. The stormwater basins resemble ponds with native vegetation and drainage — all in an effort to curb potential flood events.
“[They] help capture water where it falls and prevent water from going into those pipes and over flooding that system, because then that's going to lead to a sewer overflow, which then dumps a mixture of raw sewage and stormwater into Lake Michigan, which we don't want,” Grimm says.
A block down from Tom Mattox’s home is another bioswale built after the flooding. But even if you have the data of where the flooding happens, the students says the data on the people affected is incomplete.
Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, has historically delineated flood plains in the U.S. These are maps local municipalities rely on as they prepare for potential flooding incidents. But something missing in those maps are socioeconomic indicators, which if unknown, could overwhelm a municipality.
“That can range from how many people have diabetes in the area, to [how we] focus on renters,” says Cami Armendariz, UWM graduate student. “The ability to recover from a natural disaster changes drastically whether you own your house or whether you're a renter.”
Armendariz says their report shows how much not only renters suffered, but also Black and Latino populations in affected areas. She also referenced Groundwork Milwaukee’s project Milwaukee Flood Health Vulnerability Assessment, which she drew a lot of inspiration from.
That report honed in on Metcalfe Park and the reasons why it is such a flood-vulnerable neighborhood. Besides being divided by a railroad and being surrounded by an industrial buffer zone, it was historically affected by the city’s segregation policies. And because FEMA mapping doesn’t consider this history, parts of the neighborhood have not been identified as a flooding hot-zone.
What residents can do
Joe McCormack says the best thing someone can do is buy a flood insurance policy. There are certain areas of the country where flooding risks are so high, there are mortgage requirements to have flood insurance, including areas within Milwaukee.
The challenge is that federal flood insurance is incredibly debt-saddled due to natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina and Harvey. That's where private insurance plans come in.
“It's estimated that 1 inch of flood damage can cost $25,000 worth of damage,” McCormack says. “I don't think people are fully aware of the financial devastation that can occur with an uninsured flood event. There's a lot of flexible flood insurance packages, and there's a lot of government relief programs that are worth looking into.”
Evelyn Grimm says there are free programs provided by the city and MMSD that can help you take mitigation steps at home.
“[There] are programs for rain barrels and rain gardens,” says Grimm. “Try to capture water where it falls and install your own small-scale green infrastructure, because that will help prevent flooding and overwhelming of the sewer system.”
Cami Armendariz points back to the report by Groundwork Milwaukee and partners. She says the way this information is presented and communicated — describing risks and solutions — is essential.
“For organizations, government employees, other officials who are dealing with this and trying to find solutions, make sure you're communicating to the public in a very engaging way, creating visuals that are understandable to the public,” Armendariz says. “Someone who knows nothing about flood insurance, who doesn't know what any of these acronyms mean, they can get [these reports] and they'll want to keep reading it.”
