Edgar Mendez is walking around his block in the Clarke Square neighborhood. He’s pointing out all the damage that still litters his block one year after Milwaukee’s historic floods.
“This house, the basement actually collapsed,” says Mendez. “There was a big opening on the side where those boards are and basically garbage from the whole neighborhood was floating into his basement.”
The night of the August 2025 floods, Mendez and his family went to the ballgame and watched the Brewers beat the Mets 7-4. Coming home, the rain was pouring. Some streets were already flooding. But the water hadn’t reached his neighborhood — at least not yet.
“My wife looks out the window and says, ‘The cars!’" Mendez recalls. “She comes running to the door and we see our car is half submerged in the water already.”
It wasn’t just his car.
“Every car that drove through here got stuck,” says Mendez. “So now there's cars starting to fill the street…cars that people were abandoning. It's just nuts.”
Mendez and his family have lived in this home for about 10 years. He says during heavy rain, his basement would take in some water from time to time. But this was different.
“We look in the basement and we see the water is filling our basement quick!” he remembers.
Pictures that he’s shared on social media show the water all the way up his basement steps, just inches away from reaching the first floor.
“We're watching just in horror, like, ‘Oh my God, it's about to get to the kitchen,'" Medez says. “Cars I had already given up on, but I was still worried that it was coming up to the first floor.”
Milwaukee and surrounding areas got up to 14 inches of rain on Aug. 9 and 10.
Eventually, the water started to recede. But Mendez and the family lost everything in the basement – the family's clothes, appliances like the furnace and hot water heater, and irreplaceable items, like his cherished vintage Simpsons figurines.
He says after August of last year, some neighbors moved out or were forced out. Then in April 2026, floods hit the city again. He says while the city wasn’t ready, his block was.
“I saw people, like, almost like in rescue mode.”
The neighbors next door jumped into action, even in waist-deep water.
“People were putting their kids on the back of a truck and getting out of here,” says Mendez. “There were two people trying to use a pipe to pop the sewer in the middle of the street.”
While all this was happening. Mendez says he couldn’t move.
“I was in shock, so at first, I couldn't get out there. I was just frozen,” he says.
Survivors of natural disasters can develop PTSD. This can show up as paralyzing fear, or becoming hyper-vigilant around similar weather events.
“Even the kids, once it starts raining, everybody's on high alert,” Mendez says. “On...the anniversary of the first flood, it started pounding that day, and I literally took my car…and I drove down to the corner lot. I sat there and I waited [because] I'd rather get hit by lightning than be parked in my driveway.”
In the August 2025 flood, Mendez lost the first new car he ever bought. In April, he lost the second one. And when it comes to the house, the one he’s raised a family in, lived in for 10 years, the one his cousin lives behind — he’s had enough. Like almost everyone else on his side of the block, he’s selling and looking for a neighborhood less prone to flooding.
When FEMA came in August to help with flood recovery, Mendez asked them if there were a lot of claims from his neighbors — claims to help reimburse them for what they lost. They said no. He says there are a lot of reasons for this: it was a complicated process, maybe legal status has something to do with it, and some people were just overwhelmed. But his message for neighbors and the city: we’ve got to stick together. Because he thinks this won’t be the last time.
“Everyone's pretty conscious of the dangers, the growing dangers associated with weather and climate change and things like that,” Mendez says. “Maybe you didn't get flooded, maybe your trees didn’t fall, but eventually we're all getting impacted. So, I think it's a problem that we are all going to have to work together to fix.”
