[Music]
Major funding for In Wisconsin is provided by the
people of a lion to energy who brings safe, reliable
and environmentally friendly energy to keep homes,
neighborhoods, and life in Wisconsin running
smoothly, a lion's energy, offering energy saving
ideas on the web.
[Music]
Coming up in Wisconsin, shall like homeowners pitch
an epic battle against Mother Nature.
It's a never-ending flood.
It just keeps coming up.
A Mississippi River Lockmaster keeps order on the blue highway,
and a Milwaukee Gardener uses live fish to help
grow a bumper crop.
It's all ahead in Wisconsin.
Hello and welcome, I'm Patty Lo.
Each week in Wisconsin brings you personal stories
from around our state, stories of intriguing
people, interesting places, and serious issues
facing the citizens of Wisconsin.
Our first story tonight takes us to Milwaukee,
where we meet a former professional basketball
player. Will Allen has moved on from the NBA
and created a rather unlikely second career for himself.
In fact, if you visit his Milwaukee operation,
you may feel as though you've left the city
and entered the land down under.
From the outside, this North Milwaukee business
looks like just a roadside produce stand, but dig a
little deeper, and you'll see there's a lot more going on
beneath the surface.
[Music]
Depending on the time of day, you might find
the owner, Will Allen, one of the greenhouses out
back. He gets up early to tend his field crops.
Then comes into the greenhouses to tend his
almost invisible livestock.
They're worms.
That's kind of my thing, the worms, you know, because
they're so important.
Allen is passionate about raising worms because
they turn food scraps into high quality organic
fertilizer for his plants.
Every month, Allen's worms produce 14,000
pounds of fertilizer.
But those are real healthy, look at the size of some of those.
The greenhouses behind the produce stand hold another
one of Allen's passions, an aquaponics demonstration
system that Allen designed.
Aquaponics is basically a way to grow plants in water.
Plants grow faster in water, because the
nutrients are available.
Whereas in soil, the roots have to search for the nutrients.
So you cut growing time away down.
The way the aquaponics system works is surprisingly simple.
At the head end is a large tank of tilapia fish.
The fish excrete ammonia, which flows through
a bed of water plants.
The water plants convert the ammonia into nitrogen,
which flows through a bed of potted food plants.
The food plants use this nitrogen for nutrition.
The water is cleansed by the plants and cycles around back to
the fish tank at the head end.
These are great taste and strawberries, but
these are really good.
Allen is excited about aquaponics because he
says it's a good way to grow food in urban areas.
The soil in city plots may be contaminated,
so growing plants in water may produce food
that's safer to eat.
Another plus to Allen's design is the use of
vertical growing space, an efficiency that pays off
in the city where land values are often through the roof.
We're using vertical growing space.
Whereas in you go into most greenhouses, everything
is grown on one plane.
Whereas we're using the vertical space, so you
can take 3000 square feet and theoretically turn into
9,000 square feet of growing.
And that's very important inside cities where
you have limited space.
So this is a demonstration.
This is actually the simplest system that
you could possibly have, because you've got one
pump, you've got one tank, and all these materials
can be bought at your local hardware store.
In addition to his own agricultural interest,
Allen is co-director of a national nonprofit
called Growing Power.
Allen and the Growing Power staff design
programs and activities to help people grow and
purchase fresh produce.
One of these programs at Growing Power is open to kids only.
It's a summer internship where urban youth can really dig in.
We learn a lot about animals.
We learn a lot about plants, especially plants.
We learn how to use worms to compost soil.
We learn how plant things even better.
I kind of look at the food system as this big puzzle
with all these different pieces, which involve
working with youth and getting young people
to understand where the food comes from,
how it's produced, the kinds of food that's
healthy for them to eat.
All the benefits around growing food,
which a lot of young people, even adults
don't understand today.
Make sure it's standing straight up, pick that pepper off.
You guys can eat that pepper.
Allen's first career was in probasketball.
Now he uses sports psychology on his kids.
You guys know I come from a sports background,
so teamwork is really important.
And I'm starting to see you guys start to gel and work together
and that's really a wonderful thing to see.
And today we're going to work as a team.
We're going to plant a lot of those plants
that we have out back for the aquaponic system.
So it's going to be kind of fun.
Make sure you put it in the center.
If you got some lower leaves, they're a little shabby.
Take those off.
Kids are the voices of the community.
They're the ones that are going to make the
change in the community.
And if you can get kids to become stronger
leaders in the community, they're going to do it.
And a little bit more soil.
Bring it up.
A little bit more.
There you go.
Now you got it.
It's a great job.
Great job.
We need to make more things.
Here, as you finish, put them in the greenhouse.
Okay? Good job.
You guys are doing a good job.
A lot of times we look at these kids and say,
"Oh, they're problems.
I don't want to deal with kids," or whatever.
But if you give them responsibility,
and that's one of the things that we do here,
is that our kids run our store.
If you come in here and they run our market,
that's part of their responsibility.
And that's very important.
To give them that kind of responsibility of
taking care of the cash, or taking care of the customers,
giving them a good customer service,
greeting people properly, saying, "Thank you," to the
customers, you know, that old.
And a lot of ways, what we're doing here is we're kind
of turning back to clock the way things used to be.
Ellen's idea is about responsibility,
seem to be paying off.
He helped me a lot, and he'd take time out
and help me do stuff.
And I need to do.
And why don't you take a couple people
and start bringing some plants up?
They want to come back.
That's the big thing.
Some of these kids, this is the third year.
They don't have to come back.
They could go out and get a -- they could go to McDonald's.
But this is about a long-term piece.
We're giving you something that you can use the
rest of your life.
All these experiences, all these contacts,
all the variety of different people that
come into this place, that they can rub elbows
with, develop relationships and last a lifetime.
That is the value of what we're giving them.
? I sent you to the mountain, I tried to jump to the beach ?
? Because I come from the land of liberty ?
Ellen's energy seems endless.
His passions fuel a long list of activities,
all designed to grow fresh food and ultimately
to benefit others.
But of all his projects, it's likely that his work
with kids will produce the most valuable crop of all.
I enjoy doing this.
This is my life.
What can I say?
? ?
Many Wisconsin farmers are probably wishing they
had one of Will Ellen's aquaponics systems.
Lack of snow last winter and drought conditions this summer
brought about withered crops and brown lawns statewide.
In fact, just this week, 34 Wisconsin counties were
declared federal disaster areas.
The U.S.
Department of Agriculture can issue a
secretarial disaster designation when a county's crop
losses are 30% or more.
The federal designation triggers emergency loans
for farmers living in the drought-affected areas.
Farmers are urged to contact their local
Wisconsin Farm Service agent to find out if they meet
the criteria for aid.
Washburn County is one of the counties designated
a drought disaster area.
So it's hard to believe that a group of homeowners there
is praying it won't rain.
That's because every new drop of rain brings the people living
on the shores of Shell Lake just a little closer
to losing their homes.
In Wisconsin, reporter Art Hackett has the story.
April 19th of 2001 since we've been out of our house.
Tom and Mary Butler hung a sign next to the door
of their home saying, "Welcome to the lake."
The lake took them up on the offer.
When a first came into our house, we've had it
up as far as about this.
How much damage has there been inside?
Oh boy, we don't even know what it'll be to get it fixed up.
I mean, it's all ripped apart on the inside.
We took out the bathrooms, drywalls, bedrooms.
I mean, it's just a shell down there.
And we don't know what mold damage there is.
I don't know.
We're just guessing to get it fixed
up to the way that it was that it'd be about 80 or 90,000.
When you stand in the Butler's Mac Deck and look across the
Chess Thai wall of sandbags, there's the eerie
realization that your feet are below water level.
The Butler's have been living in a travel trailer in the front
yard for two and a half years.
It's hard not having the kids all in our house and with dinner
and having to go back and forth with because the kids
of course have to live with my parents next door.
So that's been the hardest thing not to be together
as a family anymore.
[Music]
In downtown Shaw Lake, there's another sign.
It says, "Save our Lake."
The lake seems to be doing just fine.
It's the people who live in about 100 homes next
to the lake who are searching for salvation.
According to the US Geological Survey, the water level went up
because several years in a row there were unusually heavy
rainfalls in the fall.
That's also when evaporation rates are declining.
And although current levels seem high, they aren't.
If you look back over historic lake levels,
the lake has actually, from anecdotal reports, been clear
up here where we're sitting.
It's been several feet higher vertically than it is right now.
[Music]
Tom Davidson drove up from his home in Ola-Tonnam and Asoda to
get ready for a weekend project, rebuilding his wall of sandbags.
What he hopes will be his retirement home has
been severely damaged by the high water.
We're kind of surprised it hasn't caved in yet,
but I guess we're lucky.
This is a freezing of the groundwater in the ground.
It was so saturated that wherever you step, it was wet.
And when that freezing expands and it pushes the foundation in.
These floods normally, it's a rare situation.
When it goes up, it goes down, you make repairs, life goes on.
You're dealing with this for five, six, seven, eight years.
It's just been a terribly emotional drain on people.
This has been coming up for years.
And so it's a never-ending flood.
It just keeps coming up.
And then the winds, of course, that's a big factor through.
You get your dikes built up, you know, and then you get
a high wind during the week and knock everything down
and it's pretty discouraging.
As the DNR pointed out, Shell Lake has given to changes.
As recently as 19-88, the lake's level is five feet
lower than it is today.
It is the only lake in Wisconsin that's got five
inlets and no outlets.
And it's normally stayed at a happy medium, it's getting
a little high in the spring and in for fall or drop off.
And these last years it just kept going up, come up, come up.
Construction crews are now working overtime on
a project to solve Shell Lake's flooding problems.
Usually flood-related construction projects
are big dams or levees to hold the water back.
In the case of Shell Lake, they're just trying to
make the water go away.
They've been trying for two summers.
In 2002 the city tried to create an outlet
for a lake which has none.
A four and a half mile pipeline would carry the
water to the yellow river.
Last fall amid much celebration, valves were opened.
It was the most beautiful site I'd seen in a long time.
You're just thinking, thank God, we're finally we have
this weight lifted off of us.
There's going to be a future, there is a salvation and to
have it a couple hours later.
We've got to turn it off at least.
I wasn't even in town on the day they turned it
on and what did it run?
Two, two and a half hours before the first leak came up.
The pipe which the city's taken the position on was not
the proper pipe for the job.
Now this is something that will be heard in
court in years to come.
But we have documented that the pipe we did receive
certain segments of it were manufactured with holes.
There were manufacturing flaws that allowed
some level of leakage.
Construction crews started digging up sections of the
old pipe line in September.
There are several legal actions involving the project.
So every section which is removed is marked as
the piece of evidence.
Someday the pipe may be dragged into a courtroom.
The new pipe is fused together into sections.
Workers expose the old pipe at intervals, take out a short
section and then pull the new stronger pipe into the old pipe.
If it works city officials say the pipe could drop the lake
level up to six inches a month.
The DNR permit will allow the city to maintain the
lake level to a half feet lower than it is right now.
The city thinks it has this mega plumbing problem solved.
There's only one thing that could follow things up,
invasive aquatic species.
In this case primarily Eurasian water mill foil, some
potential for zebra mussels.
Essentially we're watching for ones that if they appeared in
the lake, if there's species that are not found in the river.
If those species turn up in shell lake, the DNR could
shut down the diversion.
Yeah definitely there'd be a lot of concern because of the
cost and because of the damage both to property and habitat on
the lake from the high water.
But there's also great concerns downstream.
In order to make this project happen, we had to work with
a lot of concerned people on the lake, on the yellow river
and on impoundments downstream.
So it's not only the shell lake that we need to
protect, it's the ones farther downstream as well.
The city is attempting to protect shell lake
against invasive species by closing some boat ramps.
That forces boaters to locations where someone's undudied
a check for hitchhiking mill foil and mussels.
The city's also exploring a high temperature wash system
to clean incoming boats.
That's how important the pipeline is to area residents.
This is going to be our retirement property.
We were wondering if we were going to have to sell or not.
If the lake goes down, if the new pipe is successful in
lowering the lake, then we'll be able to continue on with
our retirement plans on this particular piece of property.
Even though the project's total price tag is nearing
$3 million, it won't solve everyone's problems.
Because the DNR gave the city a water level that it's
supposed to be able to go down to, and that only gives us
about 6 inches to play with.
So if we got a 6 inch rain, a heavy rain, or rain
for a week at a time, we could be in trouble again.
But it is depressing when you walk into the house
and it smells and it just looks the way it does.
Yeah, I thought there's a little frog right there.
I can't even picture us in there anymore.
Can you?
Yes, I can see you.
I just don't.
Yeah, it's even worse when you're still paying on it.
Yeah, we still have house payments on it.
The pipeline is supposed to go into service
around Thanksgiving.
We'll bring you an update on that story when the new
Shell Lake pipeline opens.
We move now from inland waters to the mighty Mississippi.
That's where Genoa resident Deline Moser applies her trade.
Moser is the lock master at lock and dab number seven
near La Crescent, Minnesota.
Working as a lock master means she's part traffic cop, part
manager, and part ambassador for life on the Blue Highway.
In the 1930s, a series of locks and dams were constructed
on upper Mississippi River.
These steps along the stairway of water were built
to maintain a nine foot channel that would increase
barge traffic and commerce.
There are now 29 locks and dams between St.
Paul, Minnesota and St.
Louis, Missouri.
Deline Moser is in charge of one of these stairways of water.
Every day, she drives from her home at Genoa, Wisconsin,
25-minute drive to where she works at lock and dam
number seven, located on the Mississippi River near
La Crescent, Minnesota.
The lock itself is like a stairway.
This system is.
We either raise or lower the water to whichever
side that there are.
And then we open the gates and they come in.
Then we enclose the miter gates and
then we lower the water or raise it again depending
which direction they're going.
The water seeks its own level.
Then we open the gates and the other end and let them out.
Passage through the locks is on a first-gum, first-served basis.
They are open 24 hours a day, seven days a week, to
all types of water cray.
Moser says she once locked through a single canoe
at two in the morning.
We meet quite a few people.
I don't average, it's about 12,000 small craft
lockages a year and about 1200-tobal lockages.
So you meet a lot of people, whether it's deck hands
that are working on the barbed lines or small craft,
you know, the people that are going through, you know,
maybe for a Sunday picnic or the people that are in the
fishing tournament and they really want that lockage fast,
so hurry hurry, you know.
The Mississippi River is also known as the Blue Highway,
a major transportation route for farm produce and other
goods like coal and fertilizer.
We lock through about a little over 12 million
tons of cargo every year.
Thanks, Pete.
And the chamber will start token-y down.
[applause]
In January, 2003, Moser became the first female lockmaster
on the upper Mississippi River.
I don't think about it a lot.
Other people think about it a lot more than I do.
For me, it's just, it's the work, you know, that
you've always been doing and it's just one more job.
It's just a natural step.
As long as you were coming, we wanted you to be aware of it.
What Moser calls a natural step is one few women have taken.
There are only three women lockmasters on the entire river.
Moser herself started in what she calls a more traditional
job for women on the river.
In 1986, I started as a clerk at Lock and Damitan
in Gutton, Bergaioa.
The clerk's positions are mostly female and they work part-time.
It was much more beneficial to become an operator.
And I like working outdoors.
So it was a good thing for me.
I enjoyed that.
Over the next 16 years, Moser climbed the ladder.
And I became an operator in about 1990 at Locktown.
And then in 1995, I became a head operator
at the Genoa, Wisconsin, at Lock and Damitan 8.
And then from there, I became a lock leader at
Lock and Dam 6 in Turample.
And was there about two years?
And then in January now, of 2003, I came down to Lock 7.
Here was a lockmaster.
As lockmaster, Moser is responsible for everything
that goes on within Lock and Dam number 7,
from safety and security of the structure.
Navigation of small craft and tow boat passage through
the locks, crew shifts, daily assignments, and payroll.
And again, it probably be like sometimes
high water or whatever.
On this day, an inspection team arrives.
The team is made up of people from the
Department of Natural Resources, U.S.
Fish and Wildlife Service, and engineers from Iowa,
Minnesota, and Wisconsin.
There's a lot of damage to the embankments through
flooding, particularly 2001.
Some of the worst damage has been repaired, but
other of it is in the planning stage for repair.
And as we do those repairs, we may have opportunities
for environmental restoration of some of the ecosystem
features around here.
Moser is here to assist with any questions the team may have
with this specific embankment.
We're going to be visiting about 10 of them all
together, I understand.
And so, and each site has a few things that are site
specific, so I try to answer those questions for them.
You have the high water and ice, and get some wind blowing.
I don't know why he is, but I was kind of discerning.
This is crazy.
Working on the river, Moser is exposed to an unrivaled
diversity of goods from the people she meets,
dazzling scenery, to the wildlife she sees.
And we do the dachens, and that type of thing, CC and
mind, the islands or whatever.
And of course, we have raccoon on the sites, and muskrats,
and all kinds of things.
There was a man, we didn't pay a whole lot of attention to him.
Here, the fellow was in the observation deck,
and he had a saxophone.
It was beautiful, especially with the sound, you know,
coming from the water and the blockchain, etc.
So, you never know what's going to happen at a lock and dam,
or what you're going to come in.
We have an update on a story we brought you two weeks ago.
We introduced you to a pair of Kenyan athletes who make O'Clair
their home and training ground.
Larry Emboga and Vince Tamu are aspiring Olympians who are also
veteran marathon competitors.
Well, last weekend, Emboga took first place in the
Fox City's marathon, while Tamu ran the Quad City's
marathon, placing fifth.
Congratulations to both of them.
We'll continue to keep you updated on their Olympic dreams.
We'll leave you tonight with a look at the fall beauty of
the St.
Croix River Valley.
For in Wisconsin, I'm Patty Lo.
Good night.
[Music]
Major funding for in Wisconsin is provided by the people of
Alliance Energy, who bring safe, reliable, and environmentally
friendly energy to keep homes, neighborhoods, and life in
Wisconsin running smoothly.
Alliance Energy, offering energy saving ideas on the web.
[Music]