Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers has declared a state of emergency after torrential weekend rains caused what experts are calling a “1,000-year flood” across southeastern Wisconsin, overwhelming Milwaukee’s water systems and leaving homes submerged.
The tragedy has brought together a group of community men to volunteer with cleaning up.
As reported by WUWM, for residents like Crystal Trigg and Valerie Raspberry in Milwaukee’s Lincoln Park neighborhood, the flooding was worse than anything they’d seen before. “It’s a lake or a river,” Trigg said. “It’s a lake with no fish.”
When they called the city’s 211 hotline, the women got nowhere. “I had to Google the right website,” Raspberry said. “So I put my information on the website and nobody has contacted me yet.”
While many Milwaukee residents struggled to find help, Montreal Cain, whose own basement was swamped, took initiative. “I got a call from my pastor around 7 in the morning saying, ‘Hey, church is canceled,’” Cain recalled. “For me, church is a full workday, so my body was ready to work.”
Cain chronicled his work on Facebook Live. That inspired others like Aziz Abdullah to join in. The 20-plus volunteers formed an informal crew to pump out basements, remove ruined property, and check on vulnerable neighbors.
“I walk [into people’s homes] and people are like, ‘Oh, FEMA is here!’ And it’s like, we’re not FEMA, we’re just brothers from Milwaukee,” Cain said.
Abdullah described one home where floodwaters reached chest-high. A mother there, wary of opening her doors to strangers, eventually welcomed them in. “I mean one of my guys drove down from Eau Claire and had three kids. She made them a pizza,” Abdullah said. “After a while it’s like we know new people in Milwaukee.”
By later in the week, the volunteers were helping Trigg, Raspberry and their neighbors. “And now I can breathe…I can see I’m gonna get to the end of the tunnel,” Raspberry said. “I can see it now. But, at first, I had no hope.”
Abdullah and Cain are now part of a coalition of grassroots leaders—including Vaun Mays of the Community Task Force —who organized a GoFundMe campaign to rally community support for these FEMA-like groups helping Wisconsin recover.
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