JUNEAU, Wis. — Families in Dodge County spent their weekend cleaning up after tornadoes ripped through the area on Thursday night.
The National Weather Service has confirmed at least 10 tornadoes touched down in Wisconsin on May 15. Two of those hit the small community in Juneau.
While nobody was seriously injured, the north end of the city took a devastating hit.
The Electrical Superintendent for Juneau Utilities, Nick Gahlman, said a full system outage on Thursday night left 1,200 households without power. For his own two children, seeing severe weather in real time quickly turned from fun to scary.
“When that wind came through and the lights did turn off, you could tell that both of them were pretty shaken up, but my wife was there to comfort them,” Gahlman said.
Gahlman’s team rushed to restore electricity back to nearly all homes by 9 a.m. on Friday morning. Three households had to wait longer for power because of the high level of destruction they went through.
Dan Wegener is the mayor of the city of Juneau and has been an electrical contractor for 45 years. He’s been helping residents with his electrical expertise as much as he can.
Wegener said he was shocked at how fast power was restored to the city.
“I told people, you might not see power for a couple days. I was hoping we’d get it back on the weekend, but by Friday morning we had just about everybody up and running,” said Wegener.
Wegener said about 20% of the city in the north sector got hit the hardest and the community immediately stepped up.
“I saw neighbors the night of the storm Thursday evening, people on roofs at 7 or 7:30 helping neighbors cut limbs off to get them off the roofs,” he said.
Bill Haase owns Haase Cattle Farm located on County Rd. DF, in Juneau. He said his cows survived, but most of the buildings on the farm are totally destroyed.
“Of course, when you see it, for me it gets back to the family was okay, and the house was okay — that was the most important thing,” Haase said.
Haase said there is about $200,000 worth of damage to rebuild.
“We’ll be okay. We’ll go one day at a time and have faith and go forward,” he said.“We’ll be okay. We’ll go one day at a time and have faith and go forward,” he said.
Gahlman said this violent storm will make the city stronger in the end.
“I think we are just going to come out being more unified, more thankful for what we have had and have going into the future,” said Gahlman. “I think our community’s strength is just going to build from this.”
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