The Milwaukee area suffered more than $240 million in damage to private and public property after historic flooding last August.
That’s according to a new report from the research organization Wisconsin Policy Forum.
It used data from the Federal Emergency Management Agency and local governments to understand the impact of the storms.
Tyler Byrnes wrote the After the Flood report. He's a senior research associate with the Wisconsin Policy Forum.
He says the federal government reimbursed a number of residents for their flood remediation costs. but it didn’t pay local governments for their losses.
The study shows that Milwaukee and surrounding areas got up to 14.6 inches of rain on August 9 and 10, 2025. The storms set Wisconsin’s record for the most rainfall in a 24-hour period.
Most calls to 211 – the hotline people called for help services – were for financial assistance and structural damage.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency approved assistance for individuals. But not for public entities.
Byrnes told WUWM's Teran Powell why that’s noteworthy.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
TYLER BYRNES: It does happen once in a while — about 3% of the time over the last 25 years. So, it's not a one in a million type of thing, but it's a pretty rare decision. There's thresholds that communities have to clear in terms of damage that say if you go beyond this threshold, you're not automatically considered disaster, but it's kind of a guideline. That threshold for the state of Wisconsin in 2025 was $11 million. And again, we had $43 million dollars worth of damage.
And from Milwaukee County alone, the minimum threshold was $4.5 million, and there was an estimated approximately $35 million. So that's what, seven times that minimum threshold? That's a pretty big difference between the minimum and what was actually recorded. Ultimately, again, (President Trump) has discretion over this, and he has broad latitude to make those decisions. It's difficult to speculate on the rationale behind that.
Regardless of the rationale, what's happening now is you know, because that federal aid wasn't there, there was some state aid that was able to take over a little bit of that burden. But for the most part, the local governments themselves are going to be responsible for paying for those cleanup costs, paying for those repair costs, and you know, that ultimately means the taxpayers in the Milwaukee area are going to pay for this.
TERAN POWELL: Do we know how many individuals in Milwaukee have been able to get that assistance, in what parts of the city, or anything like that?
There was about 33,000 people in Milwaukee County that were eligible for aid, and that's out of about 40,000-41,000 that applied. So, the majority of people that applied were eligible, but not all of them. And again, you know, most of that was centered on a couple of zip codes in the northwest side particularly of the city. I'm not as intimately familiar with the geography of the of the north side to say which zip codes were which.
What's the status of cleanup now in the Milwaukee area?
So, there's definitely still work to be done. I don't have a ton of data on that, although one little tidbit that we had and I have to give credit to our fellow, Dr. Becky Rose, and she had some of this data on Crisis Cleanup, which is a nonprofit that helps navigate these sorts of disaster aftermath events to help folks clean up.
And that data suggests that more than 75% of mold remediation cases that they know about have not yet been at least closed out finally. So, it's, you know, it's difficult to say if that they haven't been, the work hasn't been done, or the money hasn't been claimed, or they just haven't filed the close out. But I think that it suggests a lot of work hasn't been done yet. And, you know, mold's one of those things where at first you don't really notice, but you can develop respiratory issues and (it's) kind of a sneaky thing.
And so, living in a home with mold for six, eight months that can be bad for you. You can develop asthma over the long term, all sorts of things. And so, I think that's indicative of the fact that there's still work to be done due to those floods from August, and I know the city got hit again in April. You know, as the likelihood of these disasters continue, you're almost in a cycle where you're just done or you're not even done cleaning up from the last one, and there's a new one hitting. You know, it's going to be tough.
It suggests that maybe there's things that could be done to speed up the process, but you know, again, that that takes money, that takes creation of new processes, and all that takes time and intentionality.
