VIDEO/PHOTOS: Seven years ago, Green Bay Metro Fire Department Battalion Chief Mike Vanden Avond was one of the firefighters responding to flooding in the city from torrential late-summer rains.
โIt took less than a couple hours and all of a sudden there were feet of water up to these people’s houses,โ he said. โWe learned that we try to get the people to evacuate sooner than later, because going back and trying to get them out of their house when the water is four feet high is very difficult.โ Those kinds of events prompted the city to invest in new dry suits that are just starting to be rolled out to crews. โWe looked at upgrading to suits that are better suited to traversing water for long periods of time,โ Vanden Avond said. โMustang suits, the old cold-water rescue suits, are good for some things but theyโre not always good for moving around for hours on end.โ August storms that dropped as much as a foot of rain in some parts of the greater Milwaukee area are a reminder of that Sept. 2018 flooding in Green Bay.
