The rain and floods in the Milwaukee area this past weekend were historic. That’s according to southeast Wisconsin’s National Weather Service office. But even they couldn’t have predicted just how historic.
WUWM’s Jimmy Gutierrez talked with Tim Halbach, the Warning Coordinator Meteorologist for Milwaukee’s National Weather Service office, about what the radar showed Saturday night. And if they were also caught flat-footed.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
A question that you've probably heard a lot, why didn't we see this coming? What happened here?
[That night], one of the challenges was the forecast models that we were using. We were having a really hard time picking up on exactly where the storms are going to go. There were some forecast models that were showing absolutely nothing going through, and then we had some other ones that were showing more of these late evening storms developing along kind of a west-east boundary and just continuously reforming for multiple hours.
The situation we were in on Saturday was trying to figure out which models are initializing the best and which ones can we go with. So we had a flood watch that had been out from the previous day, and as the system started to show itself, we adjusted that and got a flood watch out for the rest of southeastern Wisconsin.
And then things went down pretty quickly after that. But any time when we get a flood event, a lot of times it's a local area that gets focused on somewhere within the general area of where we're forecasting the rainfall to occur.
And with the rain, I think something that a lot of people have heard is referred to as a 1,000-year flood. Can you just put into context how historical of the storm and flood this was?
This is the second highest rainfall amount recorded in a 24-hour period for Milwaukee. The number one day actually happened to be my 7th birthday and I happened to be at the Marquette County Zoo on Aug. 6, 1986. That day they had over seven inches of rainfall in Milwaukee.
All I remember was we were at the zoo, and it's pouring all day, so it was a great day for that. But then driving home trying to go through the Marquette interchange and there was water billowing out of the overpass, similar to what a lot of people saw outside Am Fam Stadium and at State Fair, where the water just came up because it was concrete and there's nowhere for it to go.
So this will be one of the top ever rainfall events that occurs here in the Milwaukee area. We do caution about using the term 1,000- year flood because people get the idea that, well, we have this flood so that means it's going to be another thousand years until it happens again. But the way that it's used in the hydro community is more of a 0.1% chance of it happening on a yearly basis.
Like you were saying, there's been an event like this in your lifetime. And I know you're not 1,000-years-old, but also we've had multiple 500-year floods [over the past few decades]. How can people prepare for what it sounds like, unfortunately, is becoming more common?
When the rainfall rates are this high, even people that are meaning well have issues because the water comes up around them and there's not much that they can do. So in a situation like that, try to wait it out, wait for the waters to recede before you go and do something. Or try to find higher ground.
The biggest way that we've seen people drown from these situations is that they drive through a flooded area. So the biggest thing is just not going through those, the low spots, and particularly at night, because that is when a lot of these heavy rainfall events occur.
And be aware if you're driving through a low area, be careful because you might see water going over what looks like the top of the roadway, but underneath it, the culvert can be washed out. There might not be a road there. So if you drive into something like that, you're at the mercy of the river or any moving water that's going through there as well.
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