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The storm that spawned it began before the raindrops started falling, gently at first, on the wooded bluffs of southeast Minnesota early last Saturday morning.
It began before victims fought to escape the fury of the ensuing floods Saturday night and into the morning Sunday.
It began before Wayne Dietrich saw water in his girlfriend’s backyard in Stockton, Minn., and climbed into his car as it rose over the hood.
It began before David Ask phoned a neighbor to say the creek had surged within a foot of his trailer.
It began before Troy Bierly awoke to sirens outside his Goodview, Minn., home, then spent an hour huddled upstairs with his family before a boat rescued them from their back deck.
The storm that unleashed a deadly deluge on the area began on Thursday, Aug. 16, when a rare confluence of weather conditions conspired to create the most prolific rain event in Minnesota history.
It fell on the parts of Minnesota and Wisconsin least able to absorb and dispense the water, the Coulee Region, where roller-coaster topography and loose soil are particularly vulnerable to flash floods and landslides.
The resulting floods killed seven people. Usually tranquil trout streams hammered Stockton, Minnesota City and Goodview. They left Rushford, Minn., swimming in sewage-tainted water. They sent houses careening down bluffs in Brownsville, Minn.
They damaged an estimated 1,500 homes and $26 million worth of public infrastructure in Minnesota alone.
The rain started Saturday morning as the first runner crossed the finish line at the Goodview Gallop. What began as a shower turned to torrential downpours, and slick roads slowed traffic to a crawl. In Caledonia in Houston County, soggy fair-goers scooted between buildings and barns, avoiding the muddy dirt roads.
It wasn’t until after sundown that the potential of the storm started to become evident.
RECIPE FOR DISASTER
Paul Douglas, a meteorologist for WCCO-TV in the Twin Cities, said he began fretting about the prospect of a flood earlier in the week. Late Friday before the storm, he predicted southern Minnesota might “go from drought to flood” over the weekend.
“They looked at me like I had three eyes,” Douglas said. “Nobody in their right mind predicts 15 or 16 inches of rain. But Friday, it looked like a number of elements were coming together.”
State climatologist Greg Spoden said moisture from Tropical Storm Erin, coupled with 90-degree heat, was pressing north Friday and Saturday from Iowa and Missouri. Meanwhile, a high-pressure system over the Great Lakes that created 60-degree temperatures here refused to budge.
The tug-of-war parked the weather system over southeast Minnesota and western Wisconsin, Spoden said.
“Usually when you have these storms, you end up with a boundary that doesn’t want to move, and you end up with moisture and warmth being brought across that boundary,” Spoden said.
THE FLOOD BEGINS
The National Weather Service issued flash flood warnings for Winona and Houston counties at 7:36 p.m. Saturday.
Two hours after the flood warnings, at 9:48 p.m., mudslides were reported at Houston, Minn., near Money Creek.
By 10:30 p.m., the Minnesota office of Homeland Security and Emergency Management was notified of “significant flooding” in Winona, Houston, and Fillmore counties.
The Winona County Dive Rescue Team mobilized in the Stockton area, where it would rescue 15 people, using an inflatable raft.
Just before 10 p.m., Wayne Dietrich saw water in the yard of his girlfriend’s house in Stockton and decided it was time to go.
The 62-year-old retired TRW worker drove about half a block. Then he realized floodwaters were up to the wind-shield of his Buick LeSabre.
His doors lock automatically. If the water shorted out the car, he’d be trapped.
“I thought I was dead,” Dietrich said.
But he was able to open the window and climb out of the car, he said. He walked about half a block through chest-deep water, he said, before finding shelter at a local bar. His Minnesota City home ended up untouched by the floods.
In Houston, David Ask called his neighbor about 12:30 a.m. and said Storer Creek was within a foot of his trailer but seemed to be receding.
The phone line was dead when his neighbor called back minute later. Ask’s body was found Sunday morning about 1 1/2 miles downstream. Pieces of his trailer were scattered along the creek bottom.
Ask, 55, was among seven victims the flood would claim before sunrise.
DAMAGE MOUNTS
By 1:30 a.m., evacuated residents from Elba, Minn., and Stockton were moving to Red Cross shelters and the Minnesota National Guard began to mobilize.
Garvin Brook, which had already ravaged Stockton, became a roiling river as it raced down the valley into Minnesota City and Goodview, all the while gaining volume and momentum.
Watersheds throughout the region were being similarly overwhelmed.
A mobile home park was evacuated in La Crescent, Minn., about 2:30 a.m. as the Root River continued to rise higher than it had in 47 years.
In Fillmore County, Rush Creek punched through a dike at Rushford about 3 a.m., submerging two-thirds of the city’s homes, its sewage plant and its entire business district.
But it was Garvin Brook that wreaked havoc over the largest area.
While some of the floodwater stayed in Garvin Brook and ripped through Minnesota City, a portion split off along Hwy. 61, flattening parts of Goodview and swelling Lake Goodview. Much of that water remained in the bloated lake six days later.
Bill Huber, hydrologist with the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources, said the Goodview flooding was one of the storm’s most unpredictable twists.
“It didn’t follow the valley to the Mississippi,” he said.
The detour put Goodview residents like Troy Bierly squarely in harm’s way.
About 4:30 a.m., Bierly heard sirens outside his home in the Sunny Acres subdivision. When he walked out into the darkness, he noticed floodwaters had turned Cindy Drive into a canal. It had risen to his garage door by the time he returned from talking to a neighbor.
Bierly rushed inside, shepherded his wife and daughter to the second floor, and slammed the front door shut. The water “pushed the door right through the jam,” he said.
More than an hour passed before a boat full of Goodview firefighters lifted the family from their back deck.
Like most residents in the new, upscale Sunny Acres subdivision and the rest of the region, Bierly had no flood insurance.
In the coming weeks, his son is to visit the family before being deployed to Iraq.
“Welcome home,” Bierly said.
LIVES ARE LOST
By 6:15 a.m., state officials realized local responders needed help. Emergency management crews came in from St. Paul, in part to streamline increasingly chaotic communication between agencies.
Reports started to circulate about fatalities. Six were recorded that night; a seventh was confirmed Tuesday when searchers found the body of Jered Lorenz, 37, in Rush Creek, 4 miles south of the Enterprise rest area on Interstate 90.
At 6:21 a.m. Sunday, first responders found the bodies of Victor and Joyce Gensmer near their Witoka, Minn., home. Victor, 79, was driving his wife, 67, to work in Winona when their Jeep fell about 30 feet into a chasm rushing water had opened on Hwy. 17.
One victim died a hero: David Blackburn, a 37-year-old father of four, drowned on Hwy. 6 near La Crescent after helping his wife, Dawn, to safety.
John Micheel, 67, worked for 37 years with the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s conservation service, where he drew up flood control measures for Garvin Brook. He and wife Shirley, 66, were headed home to Lewiston when their car was swept off Hwy. 23 near Stockton. A co-worker described the creek as a “thief in the night” that snuck up on someone who knew it best.
By 8 a.m., Lake Goodview had risen and still was taking on water. It ultimately flooded 150 apartments and forced 300 residents from their homes.
In Rushford, levees designed to protect the city were preventing water from draining out of the business district.
THE FINAL TOLL
Storms don’t often shock meteorologist Douglas.
He recalled the 1987 “superstorm” that dumped a foot of rain on the Twin Cities in just seven hours.
But he likened the weekend storms to the equivalent of a category 5 hurricane. “That really is what the Winona area got,” Douglas said.
In Hokah, 15.1 inches of rain fell from 8 a.m. Saturday to 8 a.m. Sunday. That shattered the state’s previous 24-hour rainfall record, set in 1972, by more than 4 inches.
National Weather Service meteorologist Jeff Boyne said an unofficial but reliable gauge recorded more than 17 inches of rain in that time near Witoka.
After a flood of catastrophic proportion in the book of Genesis, God promised Noah, “Never again will there be a flood to destroy the earth.”
Douglas hopes a similar bargain will be struck with southeast Minnesota.
“It probably will come as little consolation,” he said, “but the odds of this being repeated in our lifetime are slim to none.”
Mark Sommerhauser and Emily Kaiser are reporters for the Winona Daily News. Contributing were Kevin Behr, Amber Dulek, Britt Johnson and Chris Hubbuch of the Daily News and Ryan Stotts and Chris Hardie of the River Valley Newspaper Group.
