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UPDATE: Wind Lake residents evacuated
BY STEPHANIE BRIEN AND JANINE ANDERSON
Journal Times
WIND LAKE — At least 12 people living around Wind Lake evacuated the area as lake water seeped into or surrounded their homes on Wednesday and Thursday.
Ed Piotrowski lives on South Wind Lake Road, on the west side of the lake. He said members of the local fire department and We Energies workers knocked on his door at about 2:30 p.m. Wednesday. They asked him if he had a place to go because they were shutting off his power, he said.
When the electricity went off, so did his sump pump. The water was 4 1/2 to 5 feet deep in his basement, but the upstairs is fine so far, Piotrowski said at about 11 a.m. Thursday.
Piotrowski has lived in the house for about 10 years, and this is the fourth time his basement has flooded. But this is the first time he has ever had to evacuate his home, he said.
On Wednesday the local fire department and representatives from the American Red Cross and We Energies visited residents in flooded areas. About 12 residents voluntarily evacuated, said Tom Kramer, business manager for the Town of Norway, which includes Wind Lake. Most had friends or relatives they could stay with, he said, and the Red Cross found housing for one person.
Larry Slowinski and his fiancé Beth Crossman, of 7918 East Wind Lake Road, didn’t want to wait for authorities to tell them to leave.
“Better off to do it on your own,” Slowinski said Thursday after he pushed a canoe full of bags across his driveway to a car waiting on the other side. The water was only feet away from his house at noon Thursday and was already covering half of his truck that was sitting in the lawn.
His neighbors Barry and Cindy Brosnahan are waiting for the water to go up another foot before they evacuate, they said.
They moved to their lake house less than a year ago from Southern California where their home came close to flooding, wild fires and the occasional earthquake.
“So this is nothing,” said Barry Brosnahan, 55.
Although the two are hoping they will not have to evacuate, they have been prepared just in case. They put sandbags around the back of the house, carried all of their valuables upstairs and packed their suitcases, said Barry Brosnahan.
If water rises another foot on their electric meter, emergency officials told them to call 911 and get out, Barry Brosnahan said.
He wasn’t nervous about rain on Thursday, he said, but he is anxiously watching weather for the weekend.
Flooding on Wind Lake is exacerbated by high water in Big Muskego Lake, a larger body of water a few miles north, which drains into it.
“There is no way (Wind Lake) can handle it,” said George Jozefiak, of 7710 East Wind Lake Road.
Normally excess water in his ditch drains into Wind Lake, he said. But with the lake so high, its waters are draining into his front yard and staying there.
Besides flooded lawns and houses, there are fields full of water.
There is a single strip of land that leads to the Kuehne sod farm along South Wind Lake Road. Both sides of the strip are filled with water, looking more like an extension of the lake rather than farm fields.
“Just like always, we have quite a bit of agricultural flooding,” Kramer said. “That’s quite a concern of ours, too. There’s a lot of land along the main canal going down to Rochester that’s all flooded.”
Down the road from the farm, the South Wind Lake Road Bridge was closed Thursday.
It’s a precautionary measure, Kramer said. When water reaches the bottom of the bridge, he said there is the potential for damage to its structure.
“I’ve had my town engineer and a bridge engineer do an inspection,” Kramer said. “They said that was the prudent thing to do. … Until the water goes down, we’ll be monitoring that.”
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