MASSIVE RAINFALL CHOKES REGION

Flooded basements, lost crops, helpful hands and questions about solutions all come on the heels of weather event no one will forget

A dead fish.

That’s what Brad Anderson found by the side of his driveway on South Main Street — washed up when waters pushed the Freeman Prairie Arboretum out of its banks — and that’s the photo he shared on Facebook Saturday afternoon, along with the accompanying observation: “Pretty much sums up the weekend.”

Anderson, who is head of school at Freeman Academy and lives with his family in an area hit hard by Mother Nature, was among hundreds across the community and thousands across the Upper Midwest directly impacted by one of the most extreme rain events, certainly in recent history and if not of all time. Locally, it started with a three-inch rain Sunday night into Monday, June 17, followed by a deluge that began early Thursday afternoon, continued through Friday, before finally moving out late Saturday morning, June 22.

In between were massive sheets of rain that flooded streets, emptied into basements, filled retention ponds and lagoons, backed up sewer systems, blocked roads, drowned out crops and, in some areas, threatened lives. By multiple accounts, between 13 and 14 inches of rain fell in the immediate vicinity last week, with most of it coming in less than 48 hours.

“Never seen anything like it,” said Jim Schnaidt, a lifelong resident of Menno who has spent the past 43 years taking daily moisture readings for the National Weather Service’s state weather bureau office in Sioux Falls. “You just think that it’s got to stop raining at some point, but it didn’t. And every time it rained, it rained hard.”

In Menno, Schnaidt recorded 10.34 inches dating back to last Monday, with the biggest single 24-hour event — 4.15 inches — on Friday.

“You just have to wait it out,” he said. “It was a slow-moving disaster.”

By Tuesday of this week, sunshine, heat and humidity had become the story of the weather and much of the water had receded, but scores of people impacted in ways both big and small were still catching their breath, cleaning up and trying to make sense of Mother Nature’s heavy hand.

“Hard to know where to start,” said Hutchinson County Sheriff Maurice Waltner when asked to put last week’s weather in perspective. “These were a lot of long hours for a lot of people. As law enforcement we do our best to provide any kind of tactical support we can. We go from protecting to facilitating to dealing with the problems as they come up.”

One of the first ones, he said, was a water rescue on 435th Ave. and Highway 18 in the early-morning hours of Friday that required the services of the Menno Volunteer Fire Department.

“He found the water before we did,” said Waltner, who noted that the only way responders could get to the submerged pickup was through a field on the backside, and the driver was rescued from the roof of his vehicle.

Waltner said he and his wife were at a farm show in Spencer, Iowa earlier on Thursday but returned ahead of schedule to be closer to home, because “we knew what kind of flood emergency was coming.”

That decision was fortuitous for a number of reasons, including that the hotel they were staying in was in the direct line of flooding that would decimate that community, as well as Rock Rapids and parts of Sioux City, in the days that followed.

Upon returning to Hutchinson County, Waltner said, he remained awake, on the clock and attentive to whatever situation might arise for a total of 42 hours straight.

‘Nothing you can do’

Among those whose emotions were frozen in the moment were Ryan and Amy Sorensen, who found themselves standing shin-deep in water in the middle of the street that runs in front of their South Main Street home around 1:30 p.m. Friday, when flooding in the city of Freeman was at its worst and their finished basement family room in their 114-year-old house was being decimated by incoming water.

“We were just overwhelmed,” Amy said on Tuesday after gaining some perspective of the situation. “Just the amount of water and how fast it was coming, not just in our house but the overflow on Main Street. There was nothing we could do.”

The Sorensens, who ended up with 14 inches in their basement — it would have been more had they not had four sump pumps running — certainly weren’t alone. Their neighbors all around were dealing with situations every bit as bad or worse, and there was a coming-together of families in a tough situation.

“We just kind of rallied,” Amy said. “There was nothing we could do but try and support each other as best we could.”

John and Anna Munkvold and Patrick and Courtney Unruh also live in that part of Freeman, where runoff from the south breached the South County Road in the overnight hours of Thursday leading into Friday, which kicked off a world of problems.

Anna has video of what it looked like on Friday afternoon and what can only be described as a rogue river rushing through her backyard.

“It went through our yard three times like that,” she said, the result of which was a foot of water in part of their finished basement and 4 inches in another. “Sheetrock, carpeting, we had to pull everything out. It’s all destroyed.”

Patrick Unruh, who lives three houses to the south, said he heard the water coming into his unfinished basement in the early-morning hours of Friday. He said he initially used a Shop-Vac to begin cleaning it up before calling his mom, Holly, to borrow a sump pump.

He returned to his home 20 minutes later to find 2 1/2 feet of water in his basement.

When it was all said and done, the Unruhs took in 56 inches of water. While their basement wasn’t finished like others, there were a lot of personal belongings stored down there that were damaged, and the family lost their water heater, furnace and electrical panel.

“Initially, it was like, ‘It will be fine, it’s just a few inches of water,’ and then it was like, ‘Now it’s time to panic,’” said Patrick. “And then you just sit back and watch because it’s coming so fast that there’s nothing you can do about it.”

While that’s true of homeowners left to wait it out, there were others who sprang into action to mitigate the impact of rising waters. That includes a volunteer force from the Menno community who descended upon Our Savior’s Lutheran Church — known locally as “The Stone Church” — six miles south of Menno along the Jim River.

As was the case as recently as 2019, a crew of men, women and children arrived on site around 2:30 p.m. Friday afternoon after waters had already flooded 294th Street just to the southeast.

“I think we had over 60 people there, from ages 10 up to probably 65,” said Barb Ulmer, a lifelong member of the congregation who is one of a dozen-or-so who worships there regularly on Wednesday evenings. “Curt (her husband) had made a bunch of phone calls because he knew this was probably going to happen, and everything was ready and people were all on board. It was like clockwork.”

And in three hours, she said, volunteers had used sandbags, monster blocks and plastic tarp from silage piles to build a 280-foot dike as high as 3 1/2 feet in some places to prevent the rising Jim River from getting to the historic structure.

“It was amazing,” Ulmer said. “God at work.”

Elsewhere in Menno, firefighters were out and about helping pump water, and close attention was being paid to Lake Menno, where water was running into the emergency spillway, over camp pads and into the parking lot.

“Lake Menno got a lot bigger,” said Dave Huber, who was out surveying the situation and shooting video footage around 1:30 p.m. on Friday.

“Inundated would be the word,” said Menno Mayor Darrell Mehlhaf, who on Friday morning was already hearing about five-plus inches of rain in that community. “We have a lot of water in basements and a lot of that is from an overrun sewage system. It just takes time to get the water down. We’ve got as many pumps running as possible; there’s only a few places we can pump it so it doesn’t come back and create more problems.”

Mehlhaf said people are often quick to say that they’ve never seen anything like this before, “but from some of the reports I’m hearing, this is unprecedented. I’ve seen water over roads that I’ve never seen before.”

Back in Freeman, others were doing what they could.

Among them was Freeman police officer Barron Nankivel, who was monitoring flooded areas and blocking off streets with large orange cones where necessary, and Sheriff Waltner and his team, who had an entire county to keep safe and contacted the South Dakota Highway Patrol to help provide traffic support as road closures were becoming more frequent.

“Right now, we’re trying to find everybody the safest route — wherever they’re trying to get to,” said Trooper Shane Johnson, who on Friday afternoon was working with several Freeman volunteer firefighters and the corner of Highway 81 and the North County Road, just in front of Dollar General, following the closure of Highway 81 and Highway 44 as well as the “Bridgewater Oil” four miles to the east. “We’re here to assist the local agencies wherever they need us, and we came down to help where we can.”

Johnson said large areas of southeastern South Dakota were hit the hardest, including Canton and other places in Lincoln County, and his home community of Montrose was flooding following the Vermillion River’s exodus from its banks.

“I think everybody is struggling with the same thing, unfortunately,” said Johnson, who has been with the South Dakota Highway Patrol since 2016. “There’s no way to prepare for something like this, but all of us got into this career for hopefully the right reasons — to help people — and that’s what we’re going to do. I’ll be out all night if I have to be.”

Elsewhere, Duane Walters, who is the maintenance supervisor and water superintendent with the city of Freeman, was joined by city workers Tom Broders and Wade Rupp who worked plenty of overtime hours to control the crisis. Much of that energy was spent running pumps at the lagoon northwest of town to release water.

“When your sewer system backs up that’s a major problem and they need to keep those pumps running,” said Freeman Mayor Michael Walter. “They did what they could do and were working 36-hour shifts. I told them they needed to get some sleep, and they alternated some, but they kept on. What more can you ask for?”

The city of Freeman, meanwhile, quickly issued a call for residents to limit water usage because of a sewer system overload while local businesses did their best to try to keep up with an overwhelming demand for inventory to help deal with the water.

At Freeman Lumber Company, general manager Matt Stern said on Tuesday that, in the moment, there was high demand for gutter downspouts, plywood to board up windows that broke, “and anything that could stop water. We have three bags of tube sand left, and we sold two full pallets in one day of Sakrete that they used for retaining walls — just to do whatever they could.

Stern said Freeman Lumber tries to have a good supply of inventory on hand for immediate events that may arise and has been hanging on to a large amount of tube sand for the past year, “and we sold basically everything just to help people barricade their sump holes, or barricade their furnace, things of that nature — whatever we could do.”

At Ace Hardware, general manager Rosie Moeller said when it came to necessary supplies to deal with flooding, they ran out of pretty much everything.

“Oh my stars yes,” she said, noting that from Thursday evening into Friday they sold out of the likes of sump pumps, fittings, hoses, sandbags, box fans, floor squeegees and dehumidifiers.

“We looked at trying to get an emergency truck in, but the only place they could get to was Tea, and we weren’t sure we could get there,” said Moeller, who noted that Ace Hardware will be fully restocked thanks to a truck on Thursday that will include a mold and mildew remover for flood damage.”

In the meantime, she said, “we’ve been sending people to Mitch because he stocked up on pretty much everything.”

Mitch is Mitch Kleinsasser, who operates the third-generation family business Kleinsasser Heating & Cooling with his older brother, Morgan, and their mom, Jane, who last summer purchased Fensel’s Electric, a wholesale supplier and hardware outfit through True Value.

And Kleinsasser confirmed on Tuesday that a concerted effort was made to make multiple runs to restock inventory starting Friday morning.

“The phone started ringing at 4 in the morning and I realized we were going to have to go get stuff,” he said. “So at 6 o’clock I ran to Yankton and found all the sump pump hose and sump pumps and whatever I could find and brought it all back. We hit the door at the store at 8 o’clock and started throwing sump pumps and hoses at people; they were all waiting.”

When they realized that wasn’t going to be enough they took a larger vehicle back to Yankton “for more of everything” and got back mid-morning “and same thing. Everybody was there waiting.”

A trip to Madison followed for even more inventory “and by then I had to find my way home because water was over the roads here, here, here and here. It took two hours to get back because of detours and problems.”

Kleinsasser said an emergency order with True Value out of Mankato, Minn., followed, and three more pallets were unloaded at 11 p.m. Friday night “after everybody was running around town fixing pumps and changing things, and we tried as best we could to help people.”

That got Kleinsassers through Saturday, Mitch said, and several more emergency orders were placed with True Value, and he left for Mankato at 9 a.m. Monday morning and returned with another pickup and trailer load not long after a dam broke and flooded parts of that city.

On Tuesday, yet another truck was scheduled to arrive from the main distribution center out of Illinois because of the extreme need across the Midwest.

“This isn’t just our store; this isn’t just Freeman,” Mitch said. “This is Nebraska, Iowa, Minnesota — everywhere. It’s insane.”

Kleinsasser says you do what you have to do to help the people in need.

“There were people sitting there tapping their fingers when I’d get back with a load, but I don’t think we turned anybody away helpless,” he said. “There were several 18-hour days and we had four people in there for three days and they were all swamped. The girls were hammering on the computers and the guys were selling and helping and finding the right fitting. Very wild.”

“We just knew this was the time when we needed to make it happen,” Mitch said. “We did our job.”

And then there are Terry and Christina Jacobsen, a Freeman couple who on Saturday started going around with a payloader and pickup truck hauling ruined items from people’s homes to an area near the city’s rubble site, which remains open free of charge to anybody who needs to use it.

“There are people who need help,” Terry told The Courier on Tuesday. “And people need to step up instead of just sitting back and watching it all happen. We didn’t have any damage at our place and we decided to help those who did.”

Impact

There is, of course, significant impact that goes beyond flooded basements or the coming together of people in trying times.

Stuart Preheim, a farmer and Pioneer Seed dealer, told the Courier there will be significant loss of crops, not only because the flooded acres are underwater, but because the flooded acres are under warm water, “and they just can’t last as long.”

And while some fields are in better shape than others, “there will be revenue that’s gone,” he said, estimating that 10%-plus of the acres planted will be drowned out.

“Farmers being farmers, many are absorbed in their own enterprises and there’s also a lot of conversation about basement water and fence issues — it’s not just the crops,” he said. “There’s a general feeling of pessimism out there.”

And while he called last week’s torrential rains “unprecedented,” he said these types of weather events are happening more and more frequently.

“A generation ago, if we would have had an event like this, my dad and others like him would have said it was impossible — that something like this couldn’t happen,” he said. “But we’re hearing about things like this more often and you kind of get a little numb to it.”

But the reality is the community last week absorbed a good share of the 26-inch yearly rainfall average in a matter of days.

“Our profile is as full as we can be,” Preheim said, “and to say that in June is unheard of.”

The other impact locally that is resulting from last week’s flooding is how the cities like Freeman will regroup and respond to the logistics that come with massive runoff and clogged drainage systems that lead to sewage backup and flooded basements.

In Freeman, much of the problem resulted from runoff from the south spilling over the South County Road and flooding the arboretum beginning in the overnight hours of Thursday into Friday. Then, after a brief respite in the rainfall after daybreak, another deluge over the noon hour on Friday really kicked things lose and left many speculating that the arboretum “broke.”

That was not the case, said Dave Kaufman, president of the arboretum’s board of directors.

“There’s nothing that could have been done,” he said. “A quarter mile of that county road went under water and it had to be several inches deep, and all of that ended up in that ditch. There’s only so much the arboretum can take, just like the ditches in town.”

In fact, he said, the 40-acre grounds located in the southwestern portion of the community handled the water the way it was designed to; there was just too much of it.

“The lake is fine, the spillway is fine and the culvert that comes into the arboretum actually held a lot of the water back,” he said. “That saved us for a while, but once it topped off there was no holding it back.”

Mayor Walter, who himself ended up with a foot of sewage in his basement, offers a reminder to “always remember this — somebody’s got it worse. A lot worse.”

But he also is fully aware that the city is going to have to address the issue of flooding.

“First of all, we had a crisis and we need to take care of first things first — get the streets back, get the garbage out; there are things we have to do,” he said on Monday. “But I think there are some fairly simple solutions that the city and the county can work together on.”

Walter has heard from people who are upset, and said drainage will likely be part of the public input at city council meetings into the foreseeable future, and he welcomes it.

“Sometimes it’s OK to vent,” he said. “People are upset and so am I. I’m not laying the blame with anybody and we’re not going to move the town, but is there something we can do that might do us better? We’re certainly going to try.

“Hopefully we can learn and do better,” Walter continued. “Everybody knows the problem. It’s the solutions that we’re looking for.”