It’s early August at Riverside University High School in Milwaukee. Teachers are ducking in and out of the building, starting to set their classrooms up for the new school year.
Custodial staff are unwrapping new classroom furniture on large pallets and staging the items in the hallways.
But just one year ago, everything we see here was underwater.
“We had water at least 6, 7 feet up," says Michael Turza, the interim Chief Operating Officer for Milwaukee Public Schools. "And so anything that was in the first floor, which was heavily populated by their music and arts programs, was damaged beyond repair.”
That included instruments, a kiln for firing students’ pottery projects and an entire computer lab.
He puts his hand above the top of the lockers next to him to show the high point the water reached last summer.
More than 25 MPS schools had flooding damage on Aug. 9 and Aug. 10 last year, when the Milwaukee area received more than 14 inches of rain in just 24 hours.
Flooding in Wauwatosa schools cost $1 million to repair
Farther west, the rain damaged several schools in Wauwatosa as the Menominee River crested at more than 8.5 feet and sent water in all directions.
Kevin Heus is the school district’s operations and maintenance coordinator. He says the worst damage was to Wauwatosa West High School, which was exacerbated by nearby road construction on Center Street.
“With the road dug up.. there was no concrete or way to really flow the water away, or that significant amount of water," he explains. "So all that drained down from Center Street, came down a stairwell into the theater that's there and completely flooded that out. So we had sand, dirt, debris, everything inside there.”
Whitman Middle and Wilson and Washington Elementary schools were also damaged in the floods. Each for a different reason: A failed sump pump, or a roof drain that was disconnected, or a construction project not yet complete.
Heus says it’s actually been easier to address a dozen smaller issues that caused flooding than trying to relocate a school away from a river or out of the floodplain.
"With every single issue that we had happen, we have at least tried to make corrective action so that way it doesn't happen again in the future," he says. "Or if it does happen again in the future, impacts will be minimal. We won't be reactive anymore.”
More frequent and more powerful rain storms are likely to continue due to human-caused climate change. And experts say that being preparing for floods before they happen is the best course of action.
Chad Berginnis is the executive director of the Association of State Floodplain Managers. It’s a national organization that's based in Madison.
His group has put together a survival kit on how to "harden" a school against flooding. That can include elevating sections of a building, adding exterior barriers to keep water out, greening or landscaping school yards to better drain rainwater, and making sure all drain systems are clear before major storms.
But working with old buildings only takes you so far, Berginnis says.
“It is far cheaper typically in construction to build it right the first time, to build it safe," he says.
'Keep things out of the basement,' district officials warn school leaders
School officials in Milwaukee and Wauwatosa tell me they’ve fixed the areas where small problems led to major damage last summer.
But protecting from floods isn’t a decision one principal or teacher can make — it’s a multimillion-dollar, multi-year process.
Turza, from MPS, says it requires fixing the small problems, and unfortunately, hoping all the systems work the way they should.
“We're just trying to do whatever proactive things, like make sure the sewers are clean and sump pumps are working and things like that. We are beginning to ask our schools: keep things out of the basements," he says.
Not so different from what many in Milwaukee are doing in their own basements.
Do you have a question about education or how schools work in our area? Submit it here to WUWM education reporter Katherine Kokal.
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