Transcripts

PAULA SCHROEDER: They had to leave their homes. Minnesota Public Radio reporter Joe Follansbee is in Stockton. He's just heard a briefing from Winona County officials about the situation in that part of the state.

Joe, what's it like in Stockton this morning? Are you wet?

JOE FOLLANSBEE: Well, I can tell you, I have a lot of mud on my shoes. Mud is the word. There is mud everywhere. Well, in some places, two and three inches deep. It's obvious that the water really rips through Stockton and caused quite a bit of damage.

PAULA SCHROEDER: Has it receded quite a bit this morning?

JOE FOLLANSBEE: Well, it's receded back to pretty close to normal or after any rainstorm. The stream itself is very muddy. And it's flowing fast, but there's no standing water in the streets. There's some standing water in people's yards and in the fields.

But if you didn't know something happened, you probably might not notice that there was a flood through here.

PAULA SCHROEDER: But this was all caused by last night's rainfall. Give us a little background here on how this all happened.

JOE FOLLANSBEE: Well, about 8 o'clock last night, officials got a call that the water was rising because of some severe thunderstorms that came through here last night. As you said, it dumped about seven inches of rain in this area.

And a little bit later on, the National Weather Service issued a flash flood warning. And so officials began evacuating as many people as they could. And Winona County Sheriff Vern Spitzer just told us that almost 100% of people complied, and they left to go to Winona or to Lewiston, a little town just up the Highway 14 here.

Then, let's see. I'm trying to remember. About 5 o'clock this morning, the officials reopened the Highway 14, and people have been coming back ever since. And right now, they're just cleaning up.

PAULA SCHROEDER: I imagine this disrupted a lot of people's lives, though, even though they were complying with the order to leave their homes. Did you talk to anyone who had to do that last night?

JOE FOLLANSBEE: Yes, I talked to several people. And they all obviously have a story to tell. A woman told me how she watched a house just float downstream in front of her home or rather, in front of her business.

Another person told me how they escaped or how he escaped with his family on a four-wheel drive vehicle through his backyard, and had to keep moving back and back and back up the road because the water kept rising. And then at one point, I came across a woman just as she rescued her cat from her house. And I tell you, the woman was overjoyed. The cat was not too happy. But I think it was a nice reunion.

PAULA SCHROEDER: What's going on today? I imagine a lot of cleanup going on. Have homes been damaged by this flooding?

JOE FOLLANSBEE: Well, some homes have been severely damaged. The woman who rescued her cat, she rescued it out of a house that has been literally mashed against two other houses. The three houses are mashed together in a triangle.

As I said, there's mud everywhere. There are backhoes on the Main Street, scooping up the mud and putting it somewhere else, I guess, to be hauled away later. There's a lot of water pumps pumping water out of people's basements. And that's the story here, as far as the cleanup goes.