It’s been a month since the 1,000-year storm hammered the region. Flooding seriously damaged or destroyed nearly 2,000 homes throughout Milwaukee County. One hard-hit area was the 30th Street Corridor on Milwaukee’s northwest side. It was also heavily impacted in 2008 and 2010.
Long before the August storm, construction began on a huge stormwater project in the corridor.
Milwaukee is built on a landscape that historically was an intricate system of wetlands and streams that feed into Lake Michigan. As the city grew, wetlands were filled and streams were covered or rerouted to make way for factories and homes. But buried or not, water continues to seek its natural flow.
Here in the 30th Street Industrial Corridor on the city’s northwest side, water naturally flows into Lincoln Creek. It flows into the Milwaukee River and ultimately Lake Michigan.
When Tyrone Jones bought his home nearby 22 years ago, he wasn’t thinking about the flow of water. But he found out in 2010, when his finished basement and everything in it was destroyed.
He says the damage wasn’t as bad in last month’s flood.
“The furnace is gone, but I didn’t lose the water heater because I put a platform and I put the water heater on the platform. It didn’t come up that high,” Jones says.
Another area resident, Arneatha Cockrane, says she also escaped the worst in August, unlike many of her neighbors. She says yards were filled with ruined items that families hauled out of their homes after the storm.
“It was many bags and furniture and personal items like photos and wedding pictures, things that can’t be replaced. And some of the homes in my neighborhood, they were hit so badly, they lost everything and they left,” Cockrane says.
Cockrane says she’d already installed rain barrels to divert water from the storm sewer. Her neighbors clear the storm drains to prevent water backups.
“Those are small things we do for our neighborhood, but the flooding — that problem is a severe problem. And we have to do that as a group because it’s affecting all of us,” Cockrane says.
One of the people tasked with coming up with solutions for the area is Jerome Flogel. He’s senior project manager with the Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District.
I met Flogel at 35th and Congress. This is where the MMSD has been building the 15-acre West Basin. It’s a massive years-long project that’s meant to capture water during heavy rains.
Right now the property is a sea of weeds and grasses swaying in the breeze. “There were at least eight different businesses that originally operated here. It was 100% impervious,” Flogel says.
Crews removed buildings and their foundations. They unearthed underground storage tanks.
“So last year, we took about 6,000 dump truck loads of dirt out of here [and] in 2027, we’ll be starting the final construction, which will be a lot more excavation. There’s a lot more dirt that’s gonna come out of here. We’ve got to make room for 30 million gallons of water,” Flogel says.
When completed, the basin will be roughly the size of 10 football fields and nearly 20 feet deep. There’s also room on the parcel for green space and a walking path neighbors can enjoy.
As for stormwater, it will fall directly into the basin and enter through large underground pipes, or culverts. “And then we’ve got a smaller pipe letting it out slowly to Lincoln Creek when the water goes down,” Flogel says.
MMSD expects to complete the project by 2029.
When that day comes, Flogel’s confident the basin will reduce flooding. He says that’s already happening east of here thanks to two smaller stormwater basins located north of West Capitol Drive and east of the Canadian Pacific Railway lines.
“The north and east basin fared very well. We did not have the systematic problems, like neighborhood-wide, we had here,” he says.
But Flogel says the massive basin system alone can’t protect homeowners from basement flooding. In last month’s “thousand-year storm,” swelling groundwater made its way into old, leaky pipes, contributing to flooding. The storm and sanitary infrastructure was overwhelmed, causing backups in basement drains.
That’s why the West Basin is just one element of what would need to be multiple strategies to tackle flooding. Public hearings on MMSD’s 2026 budget, including the next phase of the West Basin’s construction, are coming up Sept. 22 and Oct. 13.
“I think we’ll see some neighbors there, here from this neighborhood. They want to make it known, they want this to go forward,” he says.
Flogel says the West Basin project has always been a high priority. “But the events of August would really, I would say, make it really difficult for this to get postponed,” Flogel says.
