Oral history interview: Griff Wigley, July 30, 2013

              Heather: It is July 30, 2013. My name is Heather Tomkins, I am a reference and instruction librarian at Carleton College. I am with Hsianghui Liu-Spencer, meta-data librarian and digital services librarian, and Griff Wigley. So, we are here to talk about the flooding that happened in Northfield in the fall of 2010. Can you introduce yourself and say a little bit about what you do and what your role is in this. 
Griff: Sure. Yeah, Griff Wigley and I have been a resident of Northfield for almost 40 years. My wife and I both raise our four kids here, they’re gone out and about and my role in this event was I have a, I have long been involved in sort of the online community aspect of Northfield. I was part of a group of people that founded Northfield.org.  in the mid-90s, right after the  web came into being so we have had an online presence in Northfield for a long time and lately, I have had a blog a locallygrownNorthfield.org in which I opinionate and we have a lot of conversation I put up a lot of photos, so really my and its primarily a civic thing I do I get a little beer money maybe out of some Google ad but it’s really just been a project  that I enjoy doing that kind of raises the level of discussion about community issues and makes it fun for people to kind of get  engaged what happening in Northfield. So for this event in 2010, this flood event I was just you know around town with my citizen blogger hat on and took lots and lots of photos of course and probably the most important part of it was because my blog has been a, for a long time, a focus of online discussions more than any other website in Northfield, for quite a while probably the key thing was after the flood was over the discussion we had about well what did we learn from all of this, and it was really quite substantive discussion that went on for several weeks on the blog, so that you know the fun stuff quote on quote as a blogger was of course taking the photos and seeing all the community activity and all the excitement and the National Guard coming to town and everything else, but long term I think it was the more substantive contribution that I helped to make was that the discussion with the citizens and some of the community leaders afterwards.
Heather: Great.  So can you say a bit about when you were first aware that the flooding was going to become a serious event?
Griff: Sure. The rain pretty much had stopped by middle of the day on Thursday and I went down to Froggy Bottoms, the Pub then owed by David Visendawn, I have known David ever since I have lived here in Northfield. And he was already sandbagging and of course the river was not up hardly at all at that point, I don’t even remember if people knew how much rain fell in the canon river watershed but that was really what David said to me was “however many inches of rain fell in the southern part of the canon river watershed and that the water would be here in a day or so” So the fact that he was out there just when the rain was letting up and was already preparing for sandbagging and getting a hold of employees, friends, and family to kind of get organized, that’s when I knew something bad was going to happen, because obviously he has owed that building for a long time he has been through a lot of high water events and so it’s like this guy, more than anybody in town, knows what could happen here. 

Heather: So in those conversations with him or later and kind of in your role I love that you have identified yourself as a citizen blogger, as a citizen blogger and in those early conversations kind of what came to your mind that sort of immediately need to be addressed?
Griff: Well I didn’t know of course how bad it was going to be, so my interest early on was just taking picture of whenever I came across something and on that first day there really wasn’t anything to take pictures of it was just Dave and a little bit of sandbagging that they were doing at Froggy Bottoms so it really wasn’t until late that night as the reports of the river continuing to rise, continuing to rise, continuing to rise that I figure that I better get up early Friday morning and because there was no information coming out from the city or anyone else that trouble was brewing so the next morning I got up about 5 o’clock I went down to the river bank and the river was up over the wall and lapping at the fence along the river walk on the west side and I could see there was someone over there I didn’t know if it was Dave Visendawn or who, but I kind of wedge myself along that fence below Bills Pizza’s or Basil’s Pizza, sorry, and went over there to see what was going on and that point I discovered I was going to take a picture with Jake Visendawn, David’s son, who was sandbagging there and I was going to take a picture of him and reached down for my smart phone which I had attached to my belt and I looked down and it was gone so evidently as I was squeezing along the bushes along the fence there a branch reached out and grabbed my phone and threw it in the river and anyway so Jake was madly, furiously sandbagging other people were coming this was 5:30 in the morning and when I went over to the Blue Monday then to kind of see what was going on, look online and again that there were no accouncements from the city or anywhere that anything bad was happening and the river was raging and continuing to rise it was pretty clear that things were going to get bad in a hurry.
Heather:  I want to talked a little bit more about kind of what else you saw on Friday and observed but I just wanted to go back to something you said about the reports that you were getting that even if there were not any official reports there was news that was coming to town about, about the water levels, where was that coming from?
Griff: You know, I don’t exactly remember I think some of it was coming from the newspaper the Northfield News, Faribault daily news is one of their sister papers and so since Faribault is upstream from us the reports that they were getting about the river’s rise were indicative of what was coming. That’s all I really remember there may have been some private citizen’s reporting things but I can’t be sure on it.
Heather: But you were hearing things?
Griff: Yeah we were, yeah
Heather: Reports were coming out? 
Griff: Yep, yep, yep
Heather: So kind of as we go through Friday later in the day and as things progressed and you were involved there taking pictures helping can you describe a little bit more about what you saw, what you heard, any reactions other reactions you have talked about some of the reactions you had, that others had to kind of give a sense of what that experience was like.
Griff: Sure, well by mid-morning on Friday the town was in gear and really active. I mean it was I remember seeing then brand new city administrator Tim Manikin with Major Mary Rossing in a vehicle and they had I was down taking pictures near the safety center and they were freaked and it was like like the enormity of what was happening was upon them and there was just a beehive of activity around the safety center which itself was kind of threatened and of course that were all the firefighters and emergency personnel and police were gathering so there as a lot happening right there and downtown there was this mad scramble for sandbags by the businesses along the river and nobody knew where to get them people were buying them from Menard’s and there was no organized sandbag effort but the call was going out and people were you know I was seeing emails “Show up to help sandbag, show up to help sandbag” so people were kind of starting to flock downtown and I was on the fourth street bridge as the water was coming up over the walls, Froggy Bottoms and saw the basically the defeat I mean it didn’t work, all their efforts were of no use the water was coming up both from underneath the hydrostatic pressure and then over the top and by it must have been 10:30 that morning they were completely under water. So that you know that was a dramatic moment and of course all the other businesses were stunned and organizing and so there was this mad rush to figure out okay where do we get sand from where do we get the bags from what do we do next? So people were showing up to help and the calls were going out and that was kind of word of mouth at that point. At some point that morning the Major went on KYMN radio to let people know what was happening. The mayor in our emergency plan the mayor I don’t know if its the bylaws of the city but the major is typically the emergency event manager so whoever is in that post is supposed to be sort of the communications point for all everything that is happening and it was, part of the problem was the police chief was out of town, he was on vacation and I’m not sure where, I mean it was the middle of September and so he was gone, the deputy police chief that was Chuck Wilarris was taking over you know managing of the police personnel the major’s job was obviously to work with them and kind of coordinate communications and that was sort of the scene Friday morning when everybody was like sort of the scene Friday Morning, this is going to get bad and the water is still coming and its horrible already and the reports were saying its going get higher it’s going to get higher, there is more.
Heather: So you mention that the volunteers were coming, word of mouth, people were starting to show up what other kind of community response did you observe or this might be a good time to talking about also the conversation that happened online as well you said after the fact the conversation, discussion about what did we learned from this? How would you characterize the response?
Griff: Well the community response I thought was terrific I mean people were coming down in droves eventually the word got out to the college campuses so St. Olaf and Carleton students were showing up high school students were showing up. And so there was you had this feeling like wow this is exactly what you want to see in a community everybody shows up to help out in an emergency situation. In retrospect, what I remember people saying and it was sort my opinion it was well intentioned but chaotic. Nobody actually knew how to coach people in stacking sandbags so you just had people throwing sand and sandbags and putting them in a pile and it was not good. The communications to the overall citizenry coming from the city was next to zero. The mayor I think was relying on well I’ll go on the radio occasionally and even in 2010 it’s not like people are glued to their radios you know so there was no emails coming out to people who had signed up on the email there was no type of weird Twitter was popular back in 2010 there was no use of Twitter. There was, the city still doesn’t have a Facebook page so the communications from the people in charge out to the citizenry was really poor. So there was like “what do we do, and you know where do we go, and what’s happening and how much worst is it going to get” so all of that was I think in retrospect was not well handled. To be fair this was a once in 500 year flood so but you that was that was I think a key thing too learn and even when the city held a meeting, I want to think it was a couple of weeks later might have been longer than that I will have to check but there was kind a meeting down at City Hall and the council chambers that where this was discussed but even there it was more there really wasn’t a  “let’s look at the pros and cons, where did we screw up” it was more of a “well we all did great” and it was boosterism I think rather than a true postmortem about how could we have done this better and so there and really nothing ever was published I think for the citizens to say “here’s what happened and here’s the good things that happened and here’s the problems that happened and here’s what we are doing to address it, and here’s what we actually have don’t to address it.” There hasn’t been that. So even three weeks ago or whenever we had this flooding again there really wasn’t, I mean obviously Twitter is a bigger deal, Facebook is a bigger deal, people were communicating amongst themselves much more this time around but still the city there was not stuff coming out from the city in an organized way. That shows me that they have really learned about how to handle this, I am hoping that in the six months because the city has a new website they now have a person who is both an HR, human resources person,  but she is also in charge of communications and so that part of her new responsibility and she has only been on the job for a month but part of her responsibility you know I am hoping it will be okay it’s not just our website day in and day out but what are we going to do at a time of crisis. Whether that’s you know a flood or a fire or a shooting or whatever it is what are the ways we’re going to use communicate to citizenry that helps mitigate the problem and rather than dance around it, you know?
Heather: I’m glad you brought up the recent flooding because I was just curious about any observations that you had anything if that recalled if you were thinking about 2010 when that happened.
Griff: Yeah, yeah. I knew it wasn’t going to be as because I mean I was sitting in Martha’s Eats-n-Treats in Dundas at 6 o’clock on that Saturday morning and the rain had just started and but you could see on the radar maps that it was localized very close to Northfield/Dundas area and that while the system had kind of stalled it wasn’t raining nearly as hard in the watershed and so the rain that hit us it came up very fast but went down and the river quit rising by 3 in the afternoon. I mean it was done raining by 9 o’clock and the river was going down by 3 o’clock so yeah it certainly I was guarding my cell phone on my pants pocket like “okay I don’t want to lose another one” but it was pretty clear that is wasn’t going to be as bad but again is like okay too bad there is no tweets coming out of city hall, there is no information, there is no blog by the emergency management people or the police to sort of say, here is what’s happening here is what’s happening I mean Northfield News, KYMN, Northfield.org they were all involved in updating people but in those cases to me there is no excuse, you really, if you read the literature, if you read the literature on how FEMA and the Red Cross and emergency managers all over the country now are using social media to keep people update in a crisis it’s pretty clear what needs to be done that should have been part of the learning from the 2010 flood and thus far I have not seen it. I am hopeful.
Heather: Well that was I am going to back to Saturday the Saturday of the flood. 
Griff: Yeah the, the well by Friday night you know there was the sandbagging was more organized I think you probably saw some of the photos you know the city trucks were coming down dumping sand there was a whole big operation in the in the Water Street parking lot. So it was clear that it was not over then, but it was a sense that we were on top of this because both sides of the river were sandbagged up pretty high and the Safety Center seemed to be protected and so at that point it was like “okay this is not that bad.” So Saturday morning I was shocked, and I think a lot of other people were shocked that when the National Guard showed up and so the whole town was quickly or the whole downtown around the river was suddenly tapped off with the yellow emergency tape and the whole sort of community outpouring of support and togetherness that was evident on Friday was gone on Saturday and everybody was pretty much relegated to being gockers. So you could not get close to anything and it was like okay, so everybody the Guard is in charge and our role as citizens is over. The whole natural of it really changed and I think in the post mortem discussion that we had about this was it was two sides. It was okay this is understandable why the National Guard was about to be called out because the river was still coming up on Saturday and so nobody yet knew how bad it was going to be so you could sort of say okay it makes sense to have the National Guard come because it was bad and businesses were being threatened. And yet on that other hand to sort of have that community involvement ‘we’re all in this together’ kind of thing suddenly gone people kind of bemoaned that. Which is understandable so I don’t think there was any huge criticism about whoever called the National Guard or the fact that they were there or that they were doing a bad job or anything of the sort it was just one of those things where it was so stunningly different from this community response to suddenly now professionals were in charge and stay away, we’re doing it all.
Heather: Hsianghui, I am going to add in a question. This is kind of different from the other conversations or this is a different question than one that we have talked with others about, I am just curious about the aerial photos that you took those great aerial photos.
Griff: Yeah!
Heather: Can you say a little bit about..
Griff: Sure! So on at some point in the afternoon on Saturday a friend of mine Mark Carson said you know my dad is coming up from Iowa we have kind of a family plane, Mark is a commercial airline pilot, and he said I think we will be able to go fly over town, Sunday tomorrow, if you want to do it. I went “Oh man, this’ll be great!” So my wife Robbie and I went down to Faribault Airport, met Mark and his wife Alice down there and they took up in the plane and so it was a gorgeous sunny it was a gorgeous day, sunny and I click click click you know photos all around Northfield took lots of other photos  apart from the flood that day and I think somebody I am trying to remember who contacted me shortly thereafter because their determination that the river peaked sometime early Sunday afternoon and started going back down and so they wanted the photos because they had documented the river’s rise at some point and so they wanted the photos to kind of coincide with that. But that’s yeah that’s what happened it was just a friend who happened to be a pilot who happened to have a plane and it just all work out.
Heather: Those are very cool photos.
Griff: It was actually surprising to me, I had been so focused on downtown that to see the damage around Carleton and then down by Waterford and how high the water was down there it was kind of like wow this is I better get back there and photos on the ground because I didn’t realize how high it had gotten. Of course the stadium was completely, or of course Laird field was completely covered and ruined and that was pretty amazing.
Heather: So you did go back and take pictures after the..
Griff: You know, I remember thinking I should I don’t actually remember if I did. You have to check my blog!
Heather: You know you have mentioned several things that really good take aways for the community from the fall 2010 flood. Are there particularly about emergency response management are there other things that you think our community should take away from that experience?
Griff: Well I think you know some of this played out in the decision to build a new police station. In other words that had that issue was in front of us at the time ‘what are we going to do about the safety center and should it be should the fire station be someplace else or should the police station be someplace else should that build be used’ so all of that was being discussed for months prior to the flood. So I think that you know the fact that there was water had come up in the basement of the safety center the sandbags that sort of thing it was a, well clearly in some people’s minds we can’t have a safety center there anymore therefore we got to you know do something other people kind of said well look we had a once every 500 year flood there was no damage, the sandbags basically worked, yeah some water got into the basement but no very much this proves that it’s not we don’t have to abandon this building its only 40 years old. So you know there  was that was interesting sort of repercussion and we now know the, it’s not fully decided we have a new police facility going up  on South Highway 3 behind Perkins. In fact I took a picture this morning the construction has started. It is still not clear to what extent the current safety center is going to be just a fire station or whether that is going to be eventually rehabbed in a way that, I think the council is currently hoping that still will be the plan they like idea of having the fire station downtown but anyway the ramification of the flood will still be talked about because of that. In terms of other things I don’t know I think there is there was still private purchases of sandbags a month ago along river walk the people owe the Carlson Capital Management building which was really they suffered tremendous damage in the 2010 flood so I think they again went out to  Menards to buy sandbags and put it along river walk and stuffed the thing in the drain that typically the river pushes up underneath and the water goes and so they had something a balloon or something stuffed in there. But I guess that’s all that comes to mind right now what we have learn and haven’t learned and the effects of that, there is probably one other issue to relate to this is what extent there is going to be support to tear down the Ames Mill Dam and there is this planning process that will probably start in August about the Canon River Corridor as our recreation corridor. The DNR for quite a few years have been urging communities around the state to tear down these old dams for the health of the river, Malt-o-Mill owes that dam, Ames Mill Dam, and they have been reluctant to foot the bill 100% to tear it down plus I think there is a fair amount of anxiety on a number of people’s parts including Malt-o-Mill as what is what are the unintended consequences of tearing down a dam just from the hydrostatic pressure once that is released that 100 year old building where that is still used for the production of the Malt-o-Mill cereal all the cold cereal is manufacturer over on Highway 19, but the hot cereal is manufacturer over at that facility so they are worried about you removed the water pressure by letting the water flow freely what is that going to mean. People’s assumption would be will for flooding purposes that would be a lot better to not have the dam there but maybe there are other unintended consequences as well some people want to put in a recreational kayaking park there where you know have one channel for canoes and for the fish to move up and down the river as they see fit,  but dedicate a portion of it for um kayaking like some communities have done. So anyways there is lots more to discuss and figure out what are we going to do with the river as it moves through town and in this age of climate change and more and more of these 100 year floods that are happening regularly people are sort of saying well we better figure this out because we are likely to get hit again, so.
Heather: Well thank you so much for talking to us and if we have questions we will definitely be in touch.
Griff: Yeah
Heather: Was there anything else you wanted to add? No?
Griff: I am pleased you guys are doing this thanks for, you know, well as citizens we love it when either of the colleges reach out and do something that enhances the town and this is clearly a project that I think will is a great plus for you guys to contribute so appreciate it.
Heather: Thank you.