- Welcome to "In Wisconsin." I'm Patty Loew.
This week...
the demolition of what used to be
the world's largest ammunitions plant
and it's still packed with explosives.
- It made it harder to find the explosives
and I guarantee you they're out there and we're finding them every day.
- Plus, whatever happened to those missing miles
along Wisconsin's highways? - When you get to Tomah,
Madison is 99 miles away; it doesn't add up.
- And we'll dig into our archives as we go
in search of Wisconsin's wolfman.
- It was hair-covered, had pointy ears.
- Those reports as we celebrate the 30-year career
of Wisconsin Public Television reporter Art Hackett
next on "In Wisconsin."
- Major funding for "In Wisconsin" is provided by:
the people of Alliant Energy who bring safe, reliable
and environmentally friendly energy to keep homes,
neighborhoods and life in Wisconsin running smoothly.
Alliant Energy, we're on for you.
And Animal Dentistry and Oral Surgery Specialists
of Oshkosh, Milwaukee and Minneapolis,
a veterinary team working with pet owners
and family veterinarians providing care for oral disease
and dental problems of small companion animals.
- This week continuing coverage on the demolition
of the Badger ammo plant.
Opening in 1942, it's a massive military installation
built on prairie between Sauk City and the Baraboo hills,
at one time the world's largest ammunitions plant.
Twelve years ago, the Army announced plans to close it.
"In Wisconsin" reporter Art Hackett is here
to tell us what happens next.
- Thanks, Patty. I was there in 1998 when they made the decision
they were going to close Badger Ammo
and now after years of legal wrangling
they're in the final years of demolition.
This week we'll show what it takes to dismantle
the war machine that is so packed with explosives
and 70 years of history in Sauk County.
- Over the years, an estimated 50,000 people have worked here.
- It is a huge facility.
I believe it was probably at one time
the largest propeller manufacturing facility
in the world by capacity,
not so much landmass, but by capacity.
- A somber, almost musical sound seeps into
the cavernous wooden buildings at Badger.
They still contain most of the equipment
which helped fight World War II, Korea and Vietnam.
The sound is the hydraulic pumps and pistons
on an excavator ripping into the building next door.
Mechanical groans echoing through nearby structures
which will soon see the same fate.
When Badger's final administrator Joan Kenney
was hired in 1989, it appeared Badger would survive
and, if needed, fight another war.
The hope lasted only a few years.
- Then in 1997 we got the first inkling
that we were among the ammunition plants
that they didn't want to maintain at all.
The situation changed.
- During World War II, it took less than a year
to get the first of the assembly lines at Badger
up and running and producing ammunition.
The process of tearing the plant apart
is taking six years.
- With a war on, it was obviously a national effort.
They were able to get almost 11,000 people
focused on making this plant operate.
Today, tearing it down, somewhere around 90 folks
are involved on a day-to-day basis in this process.
- Sitton is referring to the process of dismantling a city.
The decommissioning of Badger
doesn't just involve buildings.
Workers are crushing 83 miles of paved roads
and 1500 concrete foundations.
They are shredding wood from the buildings,
along with 28,000 utility poles.
A network of pipes above and below ground connected the buildings.
At first the Army thought the buried pipes could stay buried
but some of the chemical residues in them
are highly toxic and known to cause cancer.
Kenney says if the compounds leached into the groundwater
it would add to the Army's already significant
long-term environmental liability issues.
The pipes are now being dug out of the ground.
Even though Badger was called an ammunition plant,
it made propellant to be included in
rifle cartridges and rockets.
- This is a nitrating house. This is where the chopped cotton
was introduced to the nitric acid.
This is the beginning of the process of making nitrous cellulose.
This is where the cotton becomes explosive
and then it is further processed until it becomes
actual gun powder at the end of this production line.
- Which is one of the reasons why
removing the plant has taken so long.
The buildings and the equipment within them
have become explosive themselves.
- We have to deal first of all with the asbestos.
We have to deal with the relative age
of especially the wooden buildings.
Some of them are fairly decrepit which makes--
from a safety perspective-- makes demolition a lot harder
and you throw in the fact that most of the equipment was still here,
piping still here, explosives are still in the equipment
and the piping, etc., from whenever they stopped production.
When they laid the place away
the standard was to clean it up to the point
where there were no visible contaminants.
That made life harder because it made it harder
to find the explosives and I guarantee you
they're out there and we're finding them every day.
- When the army closed other ammunition plants
around the country, they solved the problem
of explosive residues by simply burning the buildings.
They wanted to burn Badger, too.
But open burning generates dioxins.
The Wisconsin DNR's limits of how much dioxin
could have been released in a year
would have prolonged the demolition.
- Based on the large amount of wood
in some of these bigger buildings, it looked like
we would be here for at least ten years
just in trying to burn a little bit each year.
- Excavators work under a spray of water intended to
keep any explosive residue from detonating on impact.
While metal from the buildings can be recycled,
the wood chips and crushed concrete
are going to a landfill on site.
That landfill will remain the Army's responsibility.
While some of the land has already been transferred
to the DNR for use as a park,
demolition work on the remaining acreage
is expected to continue into 2011.
One year short of what would have been
the plant's 70th birthday.
The cost to the taxpayers for wrapping up
the Army's presence in Sauk County's town of Sumpter?
$125 million...
and counting.
- Within the next year, almost all traces of the plant
will be gone and prairie plants will take its place.
- Art, the property is what, 4,000 acres? - About.
- What's in the future?
- Half of that will go to the Department of Natural Resources
for the Sauk Prairie Recreation Area
which will connect Devil's Lake State Park
and the Wisconsin River.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture's
Dairy Forage Research Center will get a piece of land,
and the remainder will go to the Ho-Chunk Nation
to establish a buffalo grazing area.
Patty? - Thanks, Art.
Stick around, we have a surprise for you.
The rest of the program is all Art, all of the time.
Some of you may not know this, but Art Hackett is retiring,
so this week we wanted to surprise Art
and give you a look at some more of his more memorable reports
over the course of his 30-year career here,
including a portion of this very first report
about home mortgages when interest rates
stood at 15% in Madison.
- Wisconsin Magazine's newest producer, Art Hackett,
recently purchased a home in Madison.
Art was lucky. He was able to assume an older mortgage
with a correspondingly lower interest rate.
If Art had been faced with a new mortgage at 15% interest,
he would have had to have searched for
alternative methods of financing
and he just might have wound up doing some flips and rollovers.
- The mortgage I've just assumed
is a so-called fixed rate mortgage.
It locks me into payments over the next 27 or so years
at the same price each month.
Due to inflation, there may not be many more mortgages
like this to assume in the near future.
- Wow. A 30-year mortgage at 15% interest, what a deal.
Did rates get even higher? - Yes, they did.
They went into the 18% rate.
Think of buying your house on a really bad Visa card.
- Yeah. (chuckles) Are you still in that house?
- Still are and it's paid for.
- Hey, all right. Who was the little one in that report?
- That would be our son, Jim.
And to show you how much time has gone by,
he now has a 3-year-old son of his own, our grandson, Leo.
- Well, when we ask people which of Art's reports
they remembered most, one came to mind.
The missing miles story. You remember that one?
- I sure do.
- We'll give it a look, Dragnet style.
A report from 1991 when Art investigated why
highway mileage signs didn't add up
as he takes you on a road trip through western Wisconsin.
("Dragnet" theme song)
- Ladies and gentlemen,
the story you're about to see is true.
- You mean somebody actually got paid to do this?
- This is the city, Los Angeles, California.
It was hazy in Los Angeles
but that doesn't make any difference...
since we were in Eau Claire.
We were working the day watch, out of public affairs.
Our photographer is Bruce Johnson.
My sound man's Tom Naunas.
My name is Art Hackett. I'm a reporter.
- Say, Artie. - Yeah, Bruce?
- Did you ever notice about these signs?
- What about them? - They don't add up.
- What do you mean?
- When you're in Eau Claire, Madison is 95 miles from Tomah.
- So?
- When you get to Tomah, Madison is 99 miles away.
Doesn't add up.
- One Adam 12. A 415 man with a gun.
One Adam 12, no warrant.
- A check of the signs along I-94
showed Bruce was right.
Somewhere along the way, six of those miles were missing
and the list of suspects was a mile long.
Maybe it was part of an elaborate CIA disinformation campaign.
An effort to confuse Canadians in case they invade.
Or maybe they vanished as part of a cheap space-time trick,
pulled by Ponz and Fleischman after they were turned down
for a cold fusion research grant at UW-Eau Claire.
Maybe they were moved to Milwaukee by way of a
late night amendment by the Joint Finance committee.
Maybe they had been vetoed by Governor Thompson.
To check it out, we headed to the district DOT office in La Crosse.
One guy there didn't want to give his name,
but claimed it might be because sometimes distances
get measured from different points.
Says it happens all the time.
- We have one right here, just down highway 14,
between Westby and Viroqua,
showing it five or six miles apart.
On one sign it says from Viroqua to Westby is five miles.
From Westby to Viroqua is six miles.
That's because of from where they measured the destination point.
- So what happens when a mile is missing?
- It's not really missing.
- And there was another fellow, said he was retired,
name of Orv Salander.
He wasn't sure that was the case here.
- That shouldn't be, because every time
they tell you so many miles are missing,
it should be the same spot in Madison, I would think.
And to the same spot, I'm wrong.
- It just doesn't add up. - No.
- Then, you're retired, you said?
What are you doing here?
- Selling chicken fry tickets. You want some?
*
- The guys in La Crosse were right about one thing.
Westby is closer to Viroqua than Viroqua is to Westby.
- But still... it just doesn't add up.
- Our investigation dragged on for several weeks.
We eventually wound up at the top,
state DOT headquarters,
talking to a guy named Chuck Spang.
He claims he's in charge of: signs.
- When you're in Eau Claire,
it says that Tomah and Madison are about 96 miles apart.
By the time you get to Black River Falls
they're 100 miles apart. Doesn't add up.
- Right. Human error.
'Cause you're going through two different highway districts
and as the plans are prepared,
one district does their set of plans
and then you go to another district and they do their signing plans.
And, there's a lack of coordination occasionally
back and forth.
- A simple explanation, two DOT districts,
two sets of numbers, numbers that just don't add up.
Something else didn't add up in Spang's office,
more signs.
- I see you still have some former governors here, too. - Uh-huh.
- Is this in case those guys get back in again?
- (laughter) No, we're just cleaning up bins and corners
of different buildings and we came across these.
- In the following weeks more investigations were held.
In a moment, the results.
The mileage sign near Eau Claire was found to be in error.
It really is 100 miles
between Madison and Tomah, not 94.
The sign was scheduled for alteration.
Orv Salander was commended for outstanding sale
of chicken dinner tickets.
And, Chuck Spang was implicated in a plot
to return Martin Schreiber and Lee Sherman Dreyfus
to the governor's chair.
- So, you still checking out road signs
as you drive across Wisconsin?
- I'm afraid so. After every time I go past those same signs,
I try and do the math in my head to see if it's still off,
and I'll be honest, at this point I don't remember
if they're fixed or not.
- It gets harder the older you get. - It does.
- Well finally, Art, we wanted to share a report
that many consider one of your classics.
A precursor to the popular Twilight series.
Do you remember the Beast of Bray Road?
- Sure do. It was actually the result of trying to check out
something you see in a supermarket tabloid.
- Okay, well, a perfect setup. Roll tape from April 1992.
*
- With all the stories about Bill Clinton,
judging the credibility of supermarket tabloids
is now more important than ever.
The problem is, the stories usually involve
outer Mongolia or northern Siberia or someplace where
there aren't a lot of reporters hanging around.
But sometimes a supermarket tabloid story
happens right in your own backyard.
Take this story here.
It says there is a wolf man hanging around
Elkhorn, Wisconsin, just off of Bray Road.
*
Bray Road is about two miles long,
winding between the farms east of Elkhorn.
Along it you'll find a man named Jeff Hubbard.
- Oh, I would think so.
People see deer and don't know what they are.
Get excited and...
- A man who thinks he knows how
the werewolf allegations began.
- Happened Halloween.
Halloween is the night a gal killed my cat out here
in the road and the night she claimed she saw a werewolf.
She pulled off to the side of the road and got out
and that's where she claimed she saw a werewolf chasing,
coming up on her car and scratched her car
and it's just hard to believe. (scoffs)
- Hubbard says the marshes along Bray Road
are home to lots of coyotes.
He's seen plenty of them while hunting.
But no werewolves.
But there is something out there. Scott Bray saw it.
- When I first saw it, it was on this little rise
just to the south of that stone pile.
- Bray owns a farm west of where Hubbard lives.
He says saw something in the fall of 1989.
- It had a rough coat, a lot of long hair.
It seemed to be real large
and strong through the front end.
And it just moved with kind of an unusual gait.
It just didn't act like a normal dog.
I went out, you know, and walked around.
It left an unusually large footprint.
That was the one thing that surprised me the most,
is the size of the print.
I thought it was some kind of a dog,
but it just didn't really look like a shepherd
and it-- but that was the type dog it was.
- These are exclusive interviews.
Astonishingly, the tabloid never interviewed either
of these two people who actually live on Bray Road.
In fact, the tabloid never interviewed
some of the people quoted in the article.
They just rewrote local newspaper clippings.
The article quotes this woman
that manages a tavern in Elkhorn.
- Never, I've never seen anything like it.
I've never seen anything like it since or before.
It was something else.
- She went by the pseudonym of Barbara Holt in a local newspaper
and showed up with the same name in the tabloid.
Her real name is Lori Endrizzi.
Her case is the one referred to in the grisly,
but actually accurate, tabloid headline.
- I saw a thing.
I thought it was a human being at first on the side of the road.
So I slowed down to look
and it was hair covered.
Had pointy ears and I drove by real slow.
And, he was just right on the side of the road, so I got a good look at him.
He was brown and silver colored hair.
He was kneeling, that's why I thought it was a human being,
because he was kneeling.
When I looked at him, I could tell he was eating road kill
and had his paws up like this, like he had elbows.
Most animals would get spooked, but this one just didn't get spooked at all.
He just looked at me and had glowing eyes.
And, very long claws.
And I'd say just by looking at him he was probably the size of an average man.
- But it didn't look like this picture. - Not at all.
The picture itself is ridiculous.
Um.
Keeping Elkhorn people locked in their homes, that's ridiculous.
Nobody's locked in their homes.
So, they made it sound very dramatic like this thing
was out killing people
and as far as anyone knows it's never hurt anybody.
- Her case, like Scott Bray's incident,
happened a few years ago.
She says she didn't talk about it until
the reported sighting last Halloween become public.
- Who would believe it?
So we kept it hush-hush for two and a half years.
- Some people still don't believe it.
- I think it was younger kids that thought they saw things--
a coyote, we got a lot of coyote out here.
There's a lot of deer out here,
but there's no werewolf as far as I'm concerned.
- Local game warden Bob Bramer doubts coyotes
were involved since they're not big enough.
- I don't doubt that they may have seen something
or a shadow or, you know, at night your mind
plays tricks with your eyes.
Who knows what may be going on or who or what caused
this action or what they did possibly see?
But there's no animal or no--
- Anything? - Nothing whatsoever.
- Except for a song on the jukebox at Lori's bar
and the remaining souvenir t-shirts in a store window,
there is not much evidence that werewolves
were once a big deal in Elkhorn.
*
But as for the tabloid's account,
there really is a Bray Road near Elkhorn
and the people you read about do exist,
although by different names,
and they really did see a werewolf,
or claim to have seen a werewolf,
or something like a werewolf,
something with hair, anyhow.
Well, now that we've cleared up this issue
I wonder if there are any other good tabloid-type stories
here in Walworth County?
- For the record, Art Hackett has contributed reports
throughout the years to these
Wisconsin Public Television programs:
The American Journey, Legislature, OnTV,
Wisconsin Magazine, 7 Central, Wisconsin Week,
Weekend, Here and Now, and In Wisconsin.
Art, I just want to take this moment to thank you
for 30 years of service to Wisconsin Public Television.
It's been such a joy to work with you.
- Thank you. - We miss you already.
Any parting words for the viewers
that have watched you all these years?
- Well, one of the truisms in life is that there are
certain things that are guaranteed to get you fired.
And one of them is to get caught lying
during your job interview.
One of the questions I was asked was,
"How long do you plan to stay here?"
And I said, "Well, five years."
So yeah, I was lying through my teeth.
Now, to be fair, the rest of that answer was that
this was right after CNN had started up.
And I said, you know, I think this is going to cause
some major shake-ups in the TV news business,
which is certainly true.
But what I said was, I figured five years here,
I can do quality work and then figure out--
- Off to CNN.
- How things shake out in the industry
and then figure out where I want to go from there.
But, I never did.
- And we are so happy you didn't.
We're so happy that you spent those 30 years with us.
We really appreciate it. - Thanks, everybody.
- Well, Art is retiring.
You will still see some of his reports from time to time,
including next week on "In Wisconsin"
when he explores the new Glacial Heritage Trail.
- This is Art Hackett.
The DNR is buying and preserving this parcel
of land southeast of Waterloo.
- The property has a beautiful topography.
Been up on it. Great views.
- But, it's unlike other preservation projects.
It's described as a "pearl on a string."
I'll explain why.
- This is "In Wisconsin" reporter Liz Koerner.
It's a subject many would prefer to ignore.
But along with taxes,
our own death and burial will arrive someday.
You may not have a choice when it comes to death,
but new environmentally friendly burial options
may surprise you.
- This is "In Wisconsin" reporter Jo Garrett.
Andy Janiki has kayaked around the U.S.
We caught up with him on the Turtle Flambeau Scenic Waters area.
- No one from the shore would realize I have a disability.
- Janiki is a quadriplegic.
Find out how this special boat and this campsite
have set him sailing.
- Those reports next Thursday at 7:30
right here on Wisconsin Public Television.
A quick reminder about our interactive blog called
the Producer's Journal.
You can find out in advance about reports we're working on,
the people we've met and the places we've been.
Check out the Producer's Journal at wpt.org
and click on "In Wisconsin."
It's updated each weekday by the people
who work in front of and behind the scenes.
Finally this week we head north to Florence County.
That's where you'll find one of the original wild rivers.
Now, there hasn't been a wild river designation
in Wisconsin in more than 40 years until last year.
To learn more about these two new wild rivers,
just go to our website at wpt.org
and click on "In Wisconsin"
for a look at our wild river reports.
Have a great week "In Wisconsin."
*
- Major funding for "In Wisconsin" is provided by:
the people of Alliant Energy who bring safe, reliable
and environmentally friendly energy to keep homes,
neighborhoods and life in Wisconsin running smoothly.
Alliant Energy, we're on for you.
And Animal Dentistry and Oral Surgery Specialists
of Milwaukee, Oshkosh and Minneapolis,
a veterinary team working with pet owners
and family veterinarians providing care for oral disease
and dental problems of small companion animals.