Severe Weather Patterns Leave Residents Questioning City's Storm Preparedness

WAUKESHA — I spent 34 years with the Department of Public Works, and I can tell you that a storm doesn't test your infrastructure nearly as much as it tests your ability to tell people where to go and what to expect. Tuesday's thunderstorm came through with 65-mph gusts and quarter-sized hail, and by the time it cleared out around 8:30 p.m., I had fielded four phone calls from neighbors asking me, a retired DPW supervisor with no current authority over anything, whether the Fox River Room at the Field House was open as a shelter. It was not. Nobody had told them that, one way or the other, and I didn't have an answer either. That's the problem I want to write about, not the storm itself.

I'm not questioning the response. The crews who cleared downed limbs off Sunset Drive by Wednesday morning did the job they always do. What I'm questioning is why, five hours into a severe weather event with a tornado watch attached to it for part of the county, a resident with no power and a cracked window had to guess whether City Hall's website had anything useful on it, rather than knowing where to look because the city told them in advance.

What Tuesday Actually Looked Like

The National Weather Service office in Sullivan had a severe thunderstorm warning up for the county by 5:15 p.m., and the worst of it moved through between roughly 6 and 7:30. Emergency dispatch call volume ran high enough that several residents monitoring scanner apps reported feeds lagging or dropping calls outright during the peak of it. I don't fault dispatch for that. I fault the fact that a resident's only source of real-time information during a countywide severe weather event was, for a lot of people, an app built for hobbyists, not anything the city itself was pushing out.

Barb Chenoweth, 54, of Backslide Way, told me she spent the worst twenty minutes of the storm on her front porch trying to decide whether her house or her car was the safer place to be, because she couldn't find a straight answer on the city's website and didn't think to check social media until it was already over. "I know the general advice, get low, stay away from windows," she said. "What I didn't know is whether there was somewhere better to go, or whether the water main breaks I could hear happening two streets over meant I should be worried about something else entirely."

"We don't need the city to prevent the storm. We need the city to tell us, before it arrives, what we're supposed to do about it."

— Bob Krueger, retired Waukesha DPW supervisor

The Downtown Grid Makes It Worse

Anyone who has tried to leave downtown Waukesha in a hurry knows the one-way grid flips direction block to block, Broadway one way, St. Paul Avenue the other, and that's confusing enough on a calm Tuesday afternoon. Add downed limbs, standing water, and a freight train that, according to two residents I spoke with, sat on the Broadway crossing for a stretch of the storm itself, and you have a downtown where an unfamiliar driver trying to get to higher ground has no real way to know which route is actually open. The city's emergency plan, if one exists in a form residents can access, doesn't mention it. A posted list of alternate routes, even something as simple as pointing out that the Newhall Avenue underpass is the one way under the tracks on the south side, would cost the city almost nothing and would help more than any single infrastructure upgrade this year.

What I'm Actually Asking For

This isn't complicated, and it isn't expensive. First, the city should publish a single storm-preparedness page, shelter locations, outage-priority explanation, alternate routes around the rail crossing, and keep it linked from the homepage year-round, not assembled after the fact when people are already asking. Second, that same information should go out with the quarterly utility bill, the same way the city already mails the recycling calendar, so residents have it on the refrigerator before they need it rather than searching for it during a power outage on a phone with 4 percent battery. Third, when dispatch call volume is running high enough to lag scanner apps, that's exactly the moment residents most need an official channel, not a hobbyist one, telling them what's actually happening block by block.

I raised this with Councilman Gary Puchalski, who told me storm communication improvements are "something the city takes seriously and is actively evaluating," which I have learned over the years is a phrase that can mean anything from a funded initiative to an email nobody has answered yet. I'd like to know which one this is before the next severe weather event, not after.

Ned England, who lives two doors down from me on Backslide Way, spent part of Tuesday evening surveying the block with the same radar gun he usually points at speeding hospital traffic, this time clocking tree limbs coming off roofs. He told me afterward that he still didn't know where he'd have gone if his own gutter had come down on him instead of a neighbor's. Neither did I, and I spent 34 years working for the department that's supposed to have that answer ready. That's not a knock on the people doing the work. It's a request that somebody write the answer down before the next storm arrives, not while it's happening.