After Milwaukee’s 2010 flood, Crystal Trigg and Valerie Raspberry had water in their front yards up to their knees. They’re in the Lincoln Park neighborhood, right next to the Milwaukee River. After this weekend's rain, the water was in their backyards — this time, past their knees.
“It’s a lake or a river,” Trigg says. “It’s a lake with no fish.”
“I can put a boat back there and it’ll float,” says Raspberry.
Both women say they woke up Sunday morning shocked to see their yards — a total of five backyards, connected by the water. They both immediately called the city’s social service hotline, 211. They say it was no help.
“I tried to do the website, because when you’re on hold forever they give you a website, but it was the wrong website,” says Raspberry. “I had to Google the right website. So I put my information on the website and nobody has contacted me yet.”
Where the city didn’t step up, community organizers did.
“I know somebody is out kicking it on Water Street, or somebody’s sleeping in their bed, and when they wake up in the morning they’ll be devastated,” Cain says.
His basement was also flooded Sunday morning, but he was awake for it. He says he lost valuable musical equipment and had a good amount to clean up — all before church.
“I got a call from my pastor around 7 in the morning saying, ‘Hey, church is canceled,’” Cain recalls. “For me, church is a full workday, so my body was ready to work.”
Cain is active in ministry, producing music and video content. He’s also been an organizer since he was 15 years old. So, since there was no church, and he says he was ready to serve, he hit the streets, streaming on Facebook Live.
“Grand rising, beautiful people. If you’re in Milwaukee and, like me, you’ve probably been dealing with some flooding,” Cain says, addressing his followers as he gets to work unclogging city drains.
He says he went to a drain he was familiar with that always clogged around 35th and Center streets. That’s when he had the idea to record himself clearing the drain as a kind of informational guide on how everyone watching could do the same in their neighborhood.
It worked.
Soon, people were reaching out with requests — their homes needed unclogging. But as the asks around the city started rolling in, so did men and young men around Milwaukee looking to help.
“Probably around 4 or 5 o’clock we’ll be able to start getting out here,” says Aziz Abdullah on his own Facebook Live.
Getting out there meant clearing flooded basements and removing damaged property. They assembled a small army of volunteers to help community elders and people without resources.
Soon, Abdullah and Cain, along with the other guys, taught themselves how to drain a basement. They learned all about water transfer pumps, even bought a few along with some hose lines and gasoline, and got to work.
“I walk [into people’s homes] and people are like, ‘Oh, FEMA is here!’ And it’s like, we’re not FEMA, we’re just brothers from Milwaukee,” Cain says. “And so they’re happy to see us. It was like a family reunion. We didn’t see despair, we saw hope.”
Abdullah recalls one of the homes they stopped at belonged to a mother and her young son. He says before they could assess the damage, they had to quickly build trust because she was opening her doors to six or seven young men she had just met.
When the guys went in, the basement was flooded — badly. In a video from that night, Abdullah gestures to his chest and says the water was up to there. They would spend hours at the house.
“I mean one of my guys drove down from Eau Claire and had three kids. She made them a pizza,” Abdullah says. “After a while it’s like we know new people in Milwaukee.”
Cain says that while they were working, neighbors on the block would approach them and ask for help. They hadn’t been able to get in touch with the city. There were no clear instructions on what they should do with their property. And like Crystal Trigg and Valerie Raspberry, in some cases, they were told the flooding was their issue to clean up, not the city’s.
The guys were helping people until close to 2 a.m. the next morning, completely free of charge. Cain says there were multiple times during the day his body failed, but it was good food and vibes that kept him going.
The next day, after roughly four hours of sleep, Aziz Abdullah was back at it — this time helping clear out Crystal Trigg, Valerie Raspberry and their neighbors’ backyards. The women said it meant the world to them that their own community stepped up where the city wouldn’t.
“And now I can breathe … I can see I’m gonna get to the end of the tunnel,” Raspberry says. “I can see it now. But at first, I had no hope.”
Abdullah says what happened was tragic, and he was lucky his home was spared any water damage. But the silver lining, he says, is that it allowed community members to show up for each other.
Early Tuesday morning, a new round of storms rolled into the Milwaukee area. Not long after, Montreal Cain was on Facebook Live, unclogging more city drains.
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