Severe weather strikes Wisconsin

ROCK SPRINGS, Wis. — At 12:30 a.m. April 14, Brian Bender and his longtime girlfriend, Jessica Kelley, were woken by the pager from Bender’s role as a volunteer firefighter. Both knew a storm was likely that night, but the strength of the storm is something they will not soon forget.

“I opened the window, and it just didn’t sound right,” Kelley said. “It sounded like a train whistle.”

Bender had an uneasy feeling and decided to make the 5-minute drive to the farm near Rock Springs in Sauk County where his milking herd resides. He was met by downed trees and power lines and had to take a pair of detours on the 1.5-mile drive before stopping his truck in the road to warn others and call the sheriff.

“I walked down from where I parked and saw some tin in my neighbor’s yard,” Bender said. “I looked and could see one silo was missing tin. When I got to the farm, I saw the silos lying down. I called Jessica and told her she needed to get down here. Everything has been a blur since.”

On that same night in Dane County, Chuck Ripp was also dealing with storm destruction. Ripp and his family milk 920 cows at Ripp’s Dairy Valley near Dane.

“The wind was incredible,” Ripp said. “I knew this wasn’t your normal thunderstorm; this one had more bite. It was a real eerie feeling.”

The storm took down the breezeway where cows pass through when heading from the freestall barns to the milking parlor. In one of the barns, a 30- by 40-foot section of the roof was torn off. In total, Ripp said there are about a half-dozen places on the farm that will require repairs.

“Everybody is safe and sound, including the cows,” Ripp said. “We feel very lucky. You have to thank God. It could have been a lot worse.”

The stretch of bad weather that hit Wisconsin from April 13-17 brought tornadoes, severe thunderstorms, flooding and large hail to various regions. Although no tornado was recorded for his area, Ripp said the sound of the storm resembled that of a twister.

“It kind of sounded like a rumbling train coming by on the tracks,” he said.

At Bender’s farm, the damage was significant. He discovered the roofs were blown off a pair of silos on the southern side of the barn. Two cement stave silos measuring 50 and 60 feet high, that were constructed on the north side of the barn, were gone. The smaller of the two silos was just rubble, and only 20 feet remained of the larger silo. Cement staves littered Bender’s pre-fresh lot, were stuck in the roof of the milk house, tore holes in the roof of his milking barn and demolished a water room built within the last year.

“I saw a silo pipe laying right beside the bulk tank,” Bender said. “I took one look at it and I was just speechless.”

The 130 milk cows at Bender Family Farms are housed in a sand-bedded freestall barn. That barn is roughly 100 feet away from the silos and the milking barn, where cows are milked in a double-8 parabone parlor three times a day. As the puzzle started of figuring out how to milk, Bender said they were thankful all cows and people on the property were unharmed.

“We were about to start milking at 3 a.m., but when we tested our detachers, they wouldn’t turn on,” Bender said. “I called Ederer’s Professional Dairy Service, and they immediately sent someone out. While we were waiting, we figured out the cows didn’t have water, and Ederer’s sent three people out right away.”

At 5 a.m., the barn was up and running and cows had made it to the parlor. Throughout the day, the community stepped up to support Bender and Kelley.

“A realtor in town, Paula Brandt, brought out lunch for everyone,” Bender said. “The sheriff stopped in and so did our state assemblyman. The crew from Zastrow came and we made a plan to get the roof of the house fixed. We’ve gotten a lot of calls and messages asking what people can do to help. In times like this, you find out who your friends are.”

Ripp’s next-door neighbor, Jerry Maier at White Gold Dairy, was also taken aback by storm damage when he arrived at his farm in the middle of the night to find the end wall of his calf barn ripped off.

“It took the first 30 feet and blew that inside the shed,” Maier said. “We moved 12 calves and not a one was hurt, so that was good.”

The storm also tore the roof off their hay and straw shed, blew in a couple of doors and walls of their freestall barn, and uprooted six trees. They lost 15 pens in the calf barn, and the entire roof is damaged.

“At least we can still feed calves underneath,” Maier said. “It’s good that it’s not winter, and we didn’t have to worry about rigging something up right away.”

At Ripp’s Dairy Valley, no cows were in the breezeway at the time the building collapsed as the 8 p.m. milking had nearly concluded.

“In the barn where part of the roof blew off, I found a little insulation and a couple of pieces of wood here and there, but all the cows were lying there chewing their cuds like nothing ever happened,” Ripp said.

Ripp and his family members had to start cleaning up in order to set up a temporary breezeway for the next milking.

“Thank goodness we have a backhoe and an excavator,” Ripp said.

After getting everything out of the way to keep cows safe, they set up gates to make a lane for cows to walk through. By 4 a.m., they were getting cows back in the parlor.

Later that day, Ripp said he received a lot of texts and phone calls from concerned friends and neighbors.

“It was nice to know people were there to help if you need them,” he said.

Ripp’s builder was going to stop by to assess the damage and determine a rebuilding plan.

In northeast Wisconsin, the persistent weather pattern that week left Duane Ducat experiencing flooding at his Kewaunee dairy farm akin to nothing he has witnessed in more than 35 years.

“There is a lot of water here — the most I have seen on our farm since June 1990,” Ducat said. “Last year, we only got 1.74 inches of rain the entire month of April. This year, we had 7.13 inches by mid-April.”

While dealing with the repercussions of violent storms, farmers are picking up the rubble around them with grateful hearts for help received.

“It looks a bit different around here, but we’ll get it all patched up,” Ripp said. “I’m very appreciative of all the people who came and helped.”