The mayor is here. Mayor Corey Mason from Racine. Now, this was not a scheduled chat we had. This was
brought on by Thursday's storms. Yeah. And I was telling the mayor before we went on. I had never seen
a storm like that before in my life. Yeah. I mean, it was intense. I mean, lots of people just
assumed it must have been a tornado. It wasn't, but it had that kind of intensity. We had a lot of
down trees on on cars and houses and then the streets and I mean, thank goodness. Nobody was hurt.
Sort of amazing to see that much damage and there were no injuries. But, you know, before we
get into some of the details, I do want to take my hat off to the DPW crew and the forest
redevision over at Parks and the police department and fire department that were, you know,
out there immediately directing traffic and getting the debris out of the streets. But yeah,
it's been quite a cleanup. And, you know, the crazy part about it is if you were here where the
studio is, you want to have noticed any of this. Really, I mean, I'd have seen a little bit of rain,
but you didn't see this kind of intensity. But if you were, maybe it, you know,
eerie or Wisconsin and east of there, if you were near the lakefront all the way up and down
from the north end of town to the south end of town, it was intense. I mean, there were,
you know, huge trees just knocked over like they were toothpicks and did a lot of damage when they
did. Well, I live on Main Street, you know, where I live. Yeah. And I went outside to put something
in the recycling bin in the backyard and I felt a drop of rain is going to say, within 10 minutes,
it looked like I couldn't, I couldn't believe it. The rain was going horizontal. Yeah.
I couldn't even see the street. It was just so windy and I saw the flag on the side of my house
just really hit and then the metal snapped off. Yeah. And it was a box on my porch just took off
in the air like the Wizard of Oz. And I was going to take a picture of it for my wife
a video, but I was so terrified. I'd never seen weather like this. I'm not from the Midwest. I just,
I never witnessed anything like that before. You know, it was it by your terms. Equally bad,
I mean, big storm, big trees just completely knocked over or limbs of trees just snapped off like
tree branches. I mean, I had, you know, a couple broken windows of our own to to contend with and
big, you know, tree limbs that, you know, crashed into things. So yeah, a lot of people were
were pretty shaken by it. You were working windows, huh? Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, a lot of people
did up and up and down and reports of pretty big sized hail. So, I don't know if it was the
hail that did it or if there were, you know, pieces of debris from the trees that did it, but it
it was substantial glass everywhere. So, and again, if you were, if you were anywhere on the
west side of town or even just, you know, a few, you know, six, eight blocks from from the lake
front, you might not have noticed anything like this, but we had power out for 24 to 36 hours for
several thousand people. We had a lot of cleanup to do. And again, it was just really good to see
the city employees respond so quickly and, you know, police and fire and DPW and
and forestry were out there right away and making sure that at least the streets were passable,
right? That the big trees and limbs that had fallen onto the tree onto the street were going to
be taken away. But yeah, if you drove through town up and down Main Street, you would have seen,
you know, entire trees upended and heaving up driveways and falling under the right away
and falling onto cars and houses. And so, you know, it was a pretty big event. I, you know,
the zoo had some real damage done to me. Yeah, I was going to ask you about that because,
I emailed Beth Hydron over the weekend and she probably, she's very busy. What happened to
that? I heard somebody said that the zoo had damage. What damage? Yeah, I mean, apparently,
one of the big tensile way, but they had a lot of downed trees as well. So it's just, you know,
just, again, you know, you don't think about it. You see these trees that look like they're
80 to 100 years old and you think they're, you know, they're going to withstand anything and then
you get something like this comes along and they just pop over like it was nothing. I mean,
some of them snapped and some of them fell over, like we're literally uprooted and turned over.
So, you know, and it was, you know, I was wondering it initially if it was just something
happening on the north side because we had heard a lot of reports of damage in one point as well,
but it went all the way down to the south side of town as well. So there were people, you know,
without power who also saw big damage and tree limbs down. So if, you know, ran the whole length
of the city north to south, but again, if you, if you were eight blocks in, you, you might not have
noticed any of it. In my property, you know, I have these huge pine trees. Yeah, huge. And I said,
oh, please don't let them come down. You'll go right through my house or my neighbor's house.
And we just had a couple of branches, small branches. I just had to pick them up. And that was
the end of that. But we were traveling through wind point yesterday. And I see these giant trees
just toppled over. What kind of wind? Yeah, push that push that a bulldozer couldn't even push
those trees over. That's why a lot of people just want it was at a tornado. And again, it wasn't,
it's called a micro boat burst apparently. But I mean, it was, it was an intense end, you know, by
all accounts, it was, you know, not even 10 minutes that all this day. Right. It was right.
Real short. Yeah. Yeah. But yeah. And I saw one person walking in front of my house with an
umbrella. And it was a typical picture with the umbrellas giving them off like Mary Poppins. And
they'll be off in the air. And I was going to yell out the window the door to get in here,
get in my porch at least away from this. But they couldn't hear me. Yeah. It was like a train going
through. No, it was, it was an intensity that I've never heard of from a thunderstorm or a
microburst. It's really, again, thank God, no one was hurt. But a lot of property damage. And
still some cleanup to do. So, so, and I heard the chainsaws going the next morning,
getting in here, all over town. We had a tree I saw remember the old lease flowers,
parking light on high and, uh, Chatham, their giant tree, one of the giant,
right on the wire. Oh, and it was just bouncing on the wire. They eventually had to get rid of the
tree because even if you go on the lakefront, uh, by North Beach, yeah, you can see all the trees
snapped and yeah, you're not toppled over, but just snapped off. Yeah, I can't imagine witnessing
that. Oh, I mean, there was some, there was one house just north of the zoo. They had these huge
pine trees falling on it. I think one of the older houses in the neighborhood and just like
fell right on top of the house. Even at the corner of, um, high and, um, Chatham, I guess,
there's a house, sir, it's kind of an odd looking boxy house. The whole top of their tree got
locked off. It's not like the tree fell down. It just snapped off and it's huge. Yeah, that was
the thing that was, so some of the trees fell over like from their roots, right? But some of them,
again, big mature trees would snap in half or, you know, near the base. And so I can't imagine
the, the power of the wind that's needed to do that between the hail and the wind and the storms
that we heard. And again, this was all in under 10 minutes by all reports. Um, so trees down,
power lines down. Um, I mean, it was, it was a big storm. And again, you'd be forgiven if you
lived, you know, a half mile inland. And so what do you mean? We got a little bit of rain. What's
the big deal? But for that, you know, Eastern, most part of the city limits, boy, it was, it was
a historic storm. My wife was a church at, uh, receiving Bible church, way down by the
interstate. And she said, oh, rain a little bit. We heard some thunder. No winds. Yeah.
I said, no winds. Yeah. You missed that. It's amazing. Yeah. We're talking to Mayor Cory Mason
from the city of Racine. And we're talking about the storm damage from last Thursday.
So people are going to have all these limbs. They, when I went that wind point, it was like
firewood. Take all you want, right? It was all chopped up. And if you can, you know,
people are trying to find people to help them change all this stuff. And these guys are busy now.
Oh, yeah, very much so. And so some people can do it themselves. I couldn't, right? But some
people can. So they have all these giant trees. They have all this wood. What do they do with it?
Yes. So for today, what we want people to do and over the weekend, too, a lot of people
are doing cleanup and glad to see the word got out because you see a lot of it. But for today,
they're going to pick up all the tree debris and limbs and everything else. Just put them right
in the right way where you'd usually put your trash bins. And we'll have, we had crews out on
Friday doing pickup, but we'll have them out all day today, too. So if you've got, you know,
a big pile of of trees and limbs and other things that you want to get rid of. And we spent
most of the weekend picking up our yard. So we got a, you'll see if you drive up and down main
street and the areas. And there are a lot of piles of of tree limbs and debris right there right
now. So we're encouraging everybody to do that so we can get that material out of there today.
If for some reason you can't get it today, you can still bring that material over to the
Pearl Street facility at 801 Pearl Street. And they'll take your, your tree debris and whatnot
and take it there. And then we drop stuff off there all the time. Yeah, yeah. They're
so that's what you do is sort of the organic material is what they call it. But then there's like,
you know, what do you do with, you know, broken debris from, you know, different parts of
all kinds of things that won't fly around. And so for that, you know, everybody has a
traffic update throughout the week. And you can put out bulky items, right? You can do five
bulky items to the stickers and that sort of thing. But if you're in one of these affected areas,
there's, there's no cap on the number of bulky items that you can put out on the curb. So on your
garbage day, if you have extra debris that's, that's not the tree limbs and everything,
are things that got broken and that you need to replace and, you know, materials that,
that snapped in half or, you know, had some no damage to it. You can put those out on the street
on your normal garbage day. Again, if you were in the affected areas, no limit on the number of
bulky items, you can put out there. You know, we've seen anecdotally a lot of, a lot of destroyed
property. And so people need to get rid of it. They can do that. Now again, if you don't want to
wait until then or you miss it on your day, you can also take it to the, to the Solid Waste
Transfer Station that of course is at the end of 21st Street. Just, just west of a green bay road,
if you turn right on Highway 31 there, you'll see the the transfer station for Solid Waste that
the city has. So if you have recyclable materials or big bulky items that you couldn't get out by,
by your trash day this week, you can take your materials there. When you came home, you were out,
you weren't at home when the storm hit. Yeah. And the broken window was your water in there and
everything? Oh, yeah, tons of water. Oh, no, tons of water. But glass everywhere. I mean, it was just,
it was just a big window that broke. Yeah. So, you know, a lot of glass. And you know, giant
tree limbs that snapped off two yards over, right? I mean, it was this big willow tree where these,
you know, and the whole tree didn't fall over. But there were these limbs that were, you know,
30, 40 feet in the air that just snapped off like there were toothpicks and did some real destruction.
And my neighbors yard, my yard, but it was just like, you just can't believe the strength of the
wind that it took to knock over some of these trees or break some of these tree limbs and just
take them down. That's just some of the footage from the tornadoes in Mayville. That's got to be
terrifying to see a tornado heading toward you. And you really, other than hiding, there's nothing
you can do, right? In the last few weeks, two going through these southern section of America,
you see these towns just wiped out. Yeah. Schools, churches, homes, factories wiped out. Yeah. And
they got a story. Do you remember? I wasn't living here. I think I was in Atlanta at the time when
the tornadoes came through Barnabelle on Highway 18 and Barnabelle to Wisconsin and wiped out the
entire town except for three or four homes. Right. And I've been back to Barnabelle several times.
I remember Dan Rather was doing the news and they showed the tower, the water tower, which
was one of the few surviving things in Barnabelle. Yeah. But the town was flattened and you go there
today and all the homes are modern except for three or four homes. Even the bank, you can see where
half the bank was destroyed and they repaired the bank to put the other half back together again.
That's got to be terrifying. I went to a diner in Barnabelle several years ago.
And I was afraid to ask somebody about it. But I wanted to know about it. And one of the people
working at the diner of the cashier said, yeah, I was a volunteer fireman and wanted to talk about it.
And then another person came, well, yeah, I was there too. They do want to talk about it because
now it's history and they write. And I don't think anybody got hurt. It's just amazing. That's a
blessing really. I mean, to see that much damage done. I don't know how you deal with these
towns being destroyed. Well, it's devastating, right? I mean, so again, I mean, really, if it
happened to you, it's really acute and you're, you know, trying to figure out how to deal with
the storm damage. But, you know, it was not a tornado. It did not level the entirety of the town.
And again, thank goodness nobody was hurt. I mean, that's that's really kind of an amazing.
There's a city of a plan for some kind of like this where if if a tornado god forbid comes through
and it devastates, you know, parts of recined, do we have a plan of attack? So there's a,
there's an emergency management office that the county runs where they will coordinate office that
then can go across jurisdictions and whatnot. Believe it or not, the person who's most
knowledge about this in the city is is David Mack because when he used to work for the county,
that was his job. He's coming in next week. Well, you should ask him all about what the emergency
management protocols are because he would know better than anybody. Yes, we have protocols in place
for different kinds of emergencies that sort of like when do we coordinate services? When do we
coordinate heavy equipment? How can that all work? But yeah, there is there's emergency management
plans in place. Now, you know, I mean, again, if you get a storm that levels the entire town,
I don't know that anybody has a plan for that, but we want to make sure that people are safe. And again,
it was great to see everybody's bringing to action after the storm happened again. He had the
police out there right away redirecting traffic where there was down trees and limbs, but there
streets weren't passable. And he had forestry and GPW out there removing those limbs to get him
out there. We energies was, you know, out right away getting the trees off the power line. So
there's really, you know, my hat's off to the public employees who, you know, all of them were
sort of home at 10 o'clock on a given night thing and they were going to have a nice easy Thursday night.
And, you know, we have to call them in and emergency situations like this and they're they're all
right there pretty shortly and out there and making this streets passable and as safe as possible.
So it's kind of incredible. You know, we did see on wind point yesterday, one of the lines is still
hanging there by the guy's grass. It's still down. It's connected, but it's in a loop about, you
know, four or five feet off the ground. When I find amazing is during these storms, how fast they
get the electric back. I remember they were, they had no electric across the street from me.
And by the time my wife went to bed, she looked at me and she saw the lights on on the guy's porch.
Oh, that's great. It was and even cable because they got to fix the, you know, I don't know how they
do all this stuff so fast because they're, you know, it's a pitch dark for one thing. Yeah.
And they got to go work. They got to find where the line is. They get to get their play with
electricity. I get nervous, plug and stuff into a wall because I don't want to get hurt. Yeah.
These guys are dealing with hot lines up there. Yeah. Now, the winter's dark. We're pretty quick.
I mean, a lot of some people were out for 24 to 36 hours. So thankfully, you know, most of the power
wasn't out too long. But yeah, they're they're out there dealing with live wires when the trees
take them down and that's that's no small feet. Okay. Quick review. If you have a lot of limbs
on your trees that came down, you come in the right away today. Like if you put them out there
today and we have crews picking them up all day to day. So if you have limbs and, you know,
tree debris and everything, you know, organic material is what they call it. If you have that,
put that in your right away today. Now, if you miss that, you can take it over a Pearl Street.
That's 801 Pearl Street. Not too far from City Hall. You can take your organic material there.
And then if you have other like stuff that broken and whatnot that in your thinking,
oh, how am I going to get rid of this, you know, broken chair or lawn equipment or whatever that
that may have broken in the storm, you can put that out on your normal garbage day.
And again, we usually have five what we call bulky waste items that that are bigger than the
garbage bin. This week, if you were in the affected areas, there's no limit to the
amount of material that you can put out. So if you have other material that's broken,
put it out on your normal garbage day. You don't need the stickers for it. Just put it on out
and we'll take care of it. Now, if you miss your garbage day, we do have the
transfer, the waste transfer station at 6,321st Street, which is west of Green Bay Road. You can
take your stuff there and drop it off there. Would you put in your window, by the way, to stop
everything from coming in when you got home? Initially, we used to garbage bag. But the next day,
I went to Home Depot and had them custom, custom RIPA sheet of plywood so that I could cover
the open hole. So yeah, I always wanted to see these four to the places with a perfectly cut
piece of plywood. I wouldn't have to do that. I wouldn't have to fasten it to the house.
Yeah, I'm not a handyman. Well, we didn't have power initially. So even with a circular saw,
you couldn't do it. So I can't, well, some of your first reaction was when you saw the window
and your wife came to your wife. So the first mention honestly was turning in down the street
is not just the trees being down, but it was just so dark, right? Because there's no power on.
And so you're sort of driving through the street. And you know, your headlights are obviously
giving you smoke. But you don't realize how much the street lights and house lights add to
the illumination on your street until you get there. And it's just all gone. And so, you know,
the basketball hoops knocked over, but there's tree limbs everywhere. And you're just thinking,
oh my gosh, how bad is it going to be when we get there? And you're the mayor. You got to worry
about everybody. Right. I'm worried about my little flagpole. You got to worry about everybody.
Yeah. But, you know, look, within minutes on the phone with the police chief with the deputy
fire chief with director of public works, director of parks, they're all out there coordinating,
right? They know what's going on. And, you know, you've got to do a little bit to encourage them
to make sure they're communicating with each other and everybody's on the same page. But they were
all out there immediately sprung into action. And again, hats off to our public employees who
done such a great job in a, in a pretty remarkable situation to keep us all safe. And you have a
fire sirens, police sirens kind of nerve-wracking. Yeah.
Mayor, you're going to be back May 28th. I'll be here. Okay. We'll get other things to talk about,
including the downing of the YMCA. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I was going to sad to see you.
It's bittersweet. It's bittersweet. I'm excited for what's next, but a lot of memories.
It's honor. Mayor Corey Mason, the city we're seeing. Thanks for coming in on the last minute.
Notice here. Thank you very much.
