Sisters With St. Michael Ties Share Tales of Duluth Flooding

A pair of sisters from St. Michael’s Gutzwiller clan, who have since settled in the Duluth area, have experienced a rollercoaster of emotions this past week, as they watched many of their neighbors and fellow community members lose everything they own-while at the same time witnessing the best of humanity as the towns pull together to carry on.

As water began trickling into Stacy Goeb’s basement Tuesday evening in Cloquet, located about 20 miles south of Duluth, Goeb was considering herself lucky as she saw the outright devastation it caused to other homes, businesses and roads at the same time. Her nearby parents, Paul and Annette (Gutzwiller) Goeb were not as lucky: they will need to refinish
their whole basement because of water damage done to the carpet and sheetrock. Despite this, she said her parents are “feeling very blessed” at the minimal damage their home took on compared with many others around them. At this point, news reports have estimated $80 million in residential damage alone.

Goeb’s co-worker, Kristi Jacobi, had some minimal flooding in her basement as well, but her best friend’s home had a much harder time with the nine inches of rain that fell over 24 hours last Tuesday. With five feet of water in the basement, Jacobi spent most of the weekend with her friend, mucking out her basement and helping to carry all their belongings out.

This scene of neighbor helping neighbor played itself out countless times throughout the area this past week, and much more is yet to be done, with people in many areas still unable to get into their homes or their workplaces. Many others have no electricity, gas or running water in addition to the extensive clean-up work ahead of them. Goeb said that the smaller, already struggling towns such as Barnum, Thompson and Moose Lake have been completely devastated and many residents will be struggling financially to repair the damage done without flood insurance. Already there are benefits being planned, hundreds of people volunteering and funds being set up for hard hit homeowners who need help. Fire departments from other communities are also on-hand to help pump water out of homes.

“I think, at first, people were in shock,” Goeb said. “We are on a hill-we don’t really expect to get flash floods and devastation like this. We don’t live in the flood plain, so a lot of these people that have damaged homes don’t have flood insurance. But I think for the most part everyone is rallying around.”

Even those whose homes have been ruined are coming together and helping each other out, said Kelly Goeb of Moose Lake. Her family home was spared, allowing them to host family friends overnight last week when all the roads to their home were underwater. This has been a common theme, Kelly said, since the town of Moose Lake was a virtual island for a time and so many roadways have been flooded or completely washed out.

“Some people that were sandbagging had already lost their homes,” Kelly said. “They knew they couldn’t save their homes so they were trying to save their neighbors’ homes.”

Moose Lake’s flooding problems were exacerbated Thursday by a pump failure that backed up the city’s sewage system and contaminated the
river, which then flooded into people’s homes, businesses and schools. Kelly said that besides the 125 flooded homes in Moose Lake, their town’s elementary and high schools were flooded as well as the hockey arena, the hardware store and the town’s Main Street and all the businesses along it.

“If you drive through town, you see that some people really lost everything,” she said. “All the contaminated stuff from their homes is
sitting out on the curb.”

Moose Lake was nearly impossible to get around for a few days, she added, because the city’s bridge was temporarily closed and so many
alternate roads saw flooding, bridge damage or were rendered impassable due to water damage. As a member of the Moose Lake hospital board, Kelly said they were thankful the hospital was not affected by the city’s pump failure, which would have required an evacuation of the hospital. They did reschedule all elective surgeries for a few days due to water restrictions, but otherwise the hospital has remained fully functional.

“It’s going to take months to fix, if not years,” Stacy Goeb said. “It’s really sad to drive around … in every town between Duluth and Willow River, all you see are homes that have piles of all their belongings in front of them, trying to clean up.”

But amongst all the damage, the sisters saw plenty of reason for hope.

“It’s just really nice to see how the community has really come together to fight this, and to help each other,” Kelly said.