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Shell Lake floods
by Stephanie Hemphill, Minnesota Public Radio
May 23, 2003

A house on Shell Lake is completely surrounded by water. Seven pumps run continuously to drain water from the basement. (MPR Photo/Stephanie Hemphill)

People living around Shell Lake in northwest Wisconsin are getting frustrated. The town has always been a popular vacation area, and now many people are turning their cabins into year-round homes. But the lake has flooded. Several families have been forced to move. Others are depending on sandbags and pumps to protect them from the high water. A drainage system that's supposed to solve the problem, doesn't work. And there's no solution in sight.

Shell Lake, Wisconsin — Shell Lake is about two hours north of the Twin Cities. The spring-fed lake is ringed with comfortable cabins and year-round homes. Only these days, a lot of them aren't so comfortable.

Ernie ZumBrunnen considers himself lucky. The lake is still several feet away from his house.

"I'm up out of the water," he says. The high water has killed five trees in front of the house. "But I don't have much of a complaint when you see what some of these people are facing."

	Ernie ZumBrunnen's dead pines

Zumbrunnen estimates at least 50 lake homes are surrounded by water. Another hundred are sandbagged. That's about a third of the houses around the lake.

Ernie ZumBrunnen is a member of the Shell Lake city council. He often drives around the lake, checking up on his neighbors.

Last time he visited Orrie and Norma Boettcher, their living room was under 8 inches of water.

Today, Norma is sitting on a swing on the deck, gazing out over the lake. Orrie is in the kitchen. He's wearing a flannel shirt and his waders. He wears the waders most of the time these days. He says it's easier to check the sandbag dikes and the pumps that way.

	The dike at Boettcher's

The living room is no longer under water. The rug is pulled back and a couple of floorboards have been torn out. The lake laps at the floor joists, just a few inches below the floor.

When the neighbors found out the Boettchers' living room was flooded, they built a sandbag dike between the rising lake and the house.

Orrie Boettcher says the volunteer crew worked for several days. "One lady was 83 years old, and she was out here tying sandbags for us," he says.

The Boettchers bought their cabin in the 1960s. In those days the lakeshore was 70 feet away from the house.

	Orrie Boettcher's pump.

The proof is in the family photos taken over the years. There used to be a badminton net and a dock between the house and the lake. Now there's just the sandbag dike.

The problem is, Shell Lake has no natural outlet. The last couple of years have been rainy, and there's nowhere for all that water to go.

The neighbors got together and paid for a pipe to carry the excess water four and a half miles away, to the Yellow River. But they can't use it. The pipe has never worked. It leaks. It's been repaired seven different times, and it still leaks.

A review of the project found the pipeline had been poorly designed, used the wrong kind of pipe, and wasn't installed properly.

Bob Erickson's house is being threatened. He wants the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources to allow the community to use the pipe - leaks and all - to take care of the flooding.

	Bill Ericksen says lawsuits are inevitable.

"It seems to me from an environmental perspective, we would be a lot better off trying to control those leaks in the pipe," he says, using silt fences and other techniques. "The environmental damage that's going on in the lake, and the human suffering seems outrageous," says Erickson.

But the Wisconsin DNR's Kathy Bartilson says the leaks in the pipe threaten a nearby trout stream. And where it runs along a township road, it sends water bubbling up onto the road surface.

"Operating it with those kind of leaks is a safety and a resource hazard," Bartilson says. "Small leaks can develop into bigger leaks. So it's really been better to shut it down and try to repair it."

But workers have tried to repair the pipe many times already. Ernie ZumBrunnen and his neighbors have their doubts about the future.

"With these houses surrounded by water," ZumBrunnen says, "if we can't get some of that or most of it pumped out by next freeze-up, the ice will just grind up the foundations."

ZumBrunnen says the lake homes provide three quarters of the taxes to run the city. He worries about the tax base if more lake homes are ruined.

"And I suppose in the extreme case, the city could be bankrupted."

The companies that built the pipeline have agreed to try once more to fix the leaks. They're hoping to have the work done by late next week.

Ernie ZumBrunnen and his neighbors are hoping it doesn't rain again in the meantime.

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