The Impact of the Flood on Kirkwood Avenue and Madison Street

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WFHB News volunteers report on the impact of the flooding several weeks ago, focusing on Kirkwood Avenue and Madison Street. 

Overnight on June 18th, downtown Bloomington saw extreme flooding, which led to the death of one resident and significant damage along Kirkwood Avenue and other parts of the city.

The flooding forced the Bloomington Fire Department to relocate its headquarters to College Avenue at the former law offices of Bunger and Robertson. It caused Hopscotch Coffee to suspend regular operations at its Madison Street location. The administrative offices at Bloomingfoods were submerged in water. Trinity Episcopal Church along Kirkwood saw three feet of standing water in the basement where the electrical panels are located.

WFHB News spoke with a local business on Madison Street and a church on Kirkwood Avenue to provide a glimpse into the impact of the flooding several weeks ago, many of which are still grappling with the cleanup efforts required to return to normal.

***

We begin at Hopscotch Coffee. Several weeks have passed since the flood. A sign in the window says “closed due to flood damage.”

Sandbags sit on the sidewalk outside the store. Jeff Grant, co-owner of Hopscotch, says the pile of sandbags are meant to prevent any more water from spilling into the coffee shop. He says they’ve since repainted the store.

Jeff stands busy, power washing the sidewalk outside the shop. He spares a moment to discuss the impact of the flooding. Grant talks about his initial reaction after receiving word that the store had flooded and cleanup efforts he took in order to prepare for reopening this upcoming weekend.

“My reaction was confusion,” he says. “It looked like there had been an earthquake.”

***

Jane Kupersmith, fellow co-owner of Hopscotch Coffee, spoke to WFHB News over the phone earlier this afternoon. Here is a transcription of that interview, which has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Q: Jane Kupersmith, co-owner of Hopscotch Coffee and Rainbow Bakery. Thank you so much for coming on to the WFHB Local News.

A: Yeah, thanks for the invitation.

Q: So first off, I wanted to talk about the flooding several weeks ago in downtown Bloomington and how it impacted you. So first off, how did the flooding impact the regular operations of Hopscotch Coffee?

A: With the flood, we had two feet of water in our Madison Street location, which is a retail point of sale for coffee drinks, but it’s also the home of our small batch roaster, which we use to send coffee out to our other locations and Bloomingfoods and Inkwell Café. So when that location was hit, we just instantly had to shut down. It was very dramatic. And, you know, I say all this to speak about our experience, but it is also representative of what a lot of other businesses and individuals have been through. So I’m not trying to play my tiny violin, but just kind of trying to share with the community what happened. But so all of our equipment was pretty messed up, we had, you know, large chest coolers that had floated, and you know, tipped over all the contents were dumped everywhere, our roaster had been partially submerged and all of our refrigeration equipment there was submerged. A lot of paper goods, I mean, it was just trashed, it was really crazy. A lot of you know, goods that were stored in the back of the space were found in the front and vice versa. So, you know, it was really pretty awful. So since that day, you know, initially we have industrial cleaning crews that specialized in flood and fire damage. So they used industrial equipment to dry the space out, you know, randomly our neighbors at the Stanford engraving center had been working on some projects in their space. So they had a dumpster in our parking lot already. And they were very gracious and let us immediately use that. So we were able to start kind of sifting through our items and seeing what was salvageable.

Q: So walk me through what it was like when you were informed of the flood. What was your initial reaction?

A: Yeah, well, I was asleep at my mom’s house in Omaha, Nebraska, actually, and received a call. I think it was like 12:15 a.m central time. So 1:15 a.m. Eastern, I received a call from Phil Phillipy, who’s the general manager at Bloomingfoods. And, you know, he, he was honestly like, he’s the Hopscotch hero of the whole thing. He had texted me, but I didn’t get the text. Because I didn’t have my notifications on. And then he accidentally pocket dialed me and he picked up and he said, ‘hey, it’s Phil, I just want you to know, there’s pretty serious flooding happening.’ So I was able to get in touch with my business partner, Jeff Grant, who, you know, ran down in the middle of the night, the water had basically receded. So it was no longer at the two-foot mark, but there was standing water throughout the space. But the most important thing that he was able to do, thanks to Phil, was go shut off our electrical panel. So you know, if we had had our equipment on while there was water in any of the circuits that’s really what can damage equipment. So we really, we really lucked out. And we think, you know, a lot of a lot of our equipment is operable, of course, it’s negatively impacted by the flood, so it won’t last as long as it would but yeah, anyway, so, so feel free to just go down there. And then the next day, my business partner and my husband were both kind of just in the space trying to restore a little bit of order to it. And then I got there the following day, and we started the process of filing an insurance claim and cataloging all of the items. on Madison Street, all of the businesses have experienced some amount of flooding and so we had already not we had been in this type of situation before but we have all been down on our block in the wee-hours of the morning, raking leaves out of the street drains and just really trying to you know, control the situation so that we could prevent the flood so that’s why Bloomingfoods was down there in the first place. You know, they knew they knew that this was a risk.

***

The flooding impacted Kirkwood Avenue especially. Video footage posted to social media showed knee-deep rainwater which had flooded the street. Vehicles were submerged all the way up to their headlights. One location in particular was hit hard – Trinity Episcopal Church. WFHB Correspondent Robert Robinson has more.

At Trinity Episcopal Church in downtown Bloomington, the consequences of the flood were no less severe. Robertson spoke with Nancy Hutchens, who described the effects and remediation efforts..

“It’s been devastating,” said Hutchens.

On the night of the flood, three feet of standing water were discovered in the church’s basement, where their electric panels are located.

“Our facilities guy who doesn’t normally work on Saturdays, was coming in to drop his wife off at work early, she had the six o’clock call. And so we swung by the church and weighed about the flood and found that the basement was, you know, like I said, three feet,” said Hutchens.

They were also unable to clear out and repair their disability elevator shaft, because of the hydraulic fluid that had leaked into the water.

“ServePro wouldn’t clean out the elevator shaft because it had a lot of hydraulic fluid, and they couldn’t when they pump they can’t, they have to put it into the city system into the sewer. And so we couldn’t go into the sewer,” she said.

These damages are likely to cost the church a massive sum of money.

“Our HVAC people have been in and out all week. We have a number of air conditioners, we lost the air handler on one, we had a mold remediation company, and they recommended replacing all the ductwork down in the basement. And the big issue for us right now is going to be the elevator. I mean, I’d say we’re looking at wasted $200,000 worth of infrastructure, not to mention the storage,” said Hutchens.

Additionally, water and leaked hydraulic oil resulted in the destruction of a number of irreplaceable figurines, furniture, and other church property. Hutchens described the damage to Trinity Episcopal’s boxes of nativity scenes, many rare and from all over the world.

“So we just spent last week trying to go through those boxes. And so because we had no elevator to all this stuff, these water-logged boxes, not just the nativity scenes, but building materials down there, everything had to be brought up, you know, from the basement. It was very heavy and laborious. So anyway, we had people going through that, and we were able to clean the ones that were made out of ceramic or glass, all of the others that were made of wood, papier-mâché, or some had fabric on them – we had to toss them all,” she said.

The total cost of the damages will likely not be known for some time.

***

The flooding not only impacted store owners, but employees as well. Furthermore, it impacted residents’ homes – many of which are renters who have been displaced due to flooding. And now, we visit the second-half of our conversation with Hopscotch Coffee co-owner, Jane Kupersmith, who touches on how the flooding affected residents and about the reopening of the coffee shop.

Q: I wanted to ask you Jane, what impact did this have, not only for you, but your employees – the folks at hopscotch that work at the Madison Street location, what’s that been like for them?

A: We have multiple crews operating out of there, we have people doing prep beverage prep work, we have people roasting coffee, and then, there’s the barista who you might interact with, if you ever go in there to get a drink. Our operations were immediately shut down. So those people weren’t working their regular shifts. Once the industrial cleaning crews were out, we felt like it was safe. They had treated everything with antimicrobial cleaning materials. And so at that point, we felt like it was safe for everyone to be in. So we extended the offer of, you know, double-pay, if you come in and work painting, or you know, whatever shifts that we tried to kind of make up for a little bit of lost income. But honestly, a lot of our staff were dealing with their own flood issues. For the property owners, they were having to deal with their own cleanup and repair. And that just takes a lot of bandwidth. So, you know, for that person, specifically, I think it ended up being like a silver lining that they had the space to not work while they were trying to put the pieces of their own life back together. And then there are other staff members who were dealing with flood loss at home from the perspective of a renter, you know, so they were having to, you know, try to advocate for repair, recovery and mitigation. And I don’t think that those situations necessarily went super smoothly. And in fact, I did want to mention, I told you earlier that I work for the city in small business development, and I was talking with the Housing and Neighborhood Development folks today to find out like, what is the tipping point for an individual if they’re dealing with flood damage at home? When should they call the city? When is it that they should be reporting a situation and they said that if an individual is, you know, requesting repair, and just not getting a response from their landlord, or they feel like they’re not getting a response, and it’s, it’s time to call the HAND department, and that phone number is 812-349-3420. And they can help, you know, they may or may not need to take action, but they can help the tenant figure out, you know, what needs to happen. So, anyway, that’s just to say, like, we’re dealing with this from the business side, but simultaneously our employees are dealing with this at home.

Q: Your location on Madison Street is again, temporarily closed. How long do you expect until you return to normal operations again?

A: Yeah, well, we’re pretty excited we plan to open this Saturday, which is July 3, at our normal Saturday time. I believe we open at eight o’clock at that location on Saturday. And we try to look for, you know, the bright spots, always. And since we hadn’t returned to in-house service, since we decreased our operations for COVID. We decided that we’ll reopen on Saturday and we’ll invite people back into our space. So the shop is looking really great. It has a fresh coat of paint, everything has been cleaned inside and out. And so this, you know, feels like a happy invitation to our customers to come back in and visit with us.

Q: Absolutely. Now, Jane, is there anything else you would like to add before we part ways – anything I might have missed on my end?

A: Yeah, I you know, I think I would just add that we are so grateful for our community of customers and also our business community in Bloomington. It’s really interesting, working in such a small town. I think people who aren’t in food service might not realize that we’re all talking to each other constantly behind the scenes and we’ve had, you know, offers of support from the other local coffee roasters to help us fill the gap while our roaster wasn’t running. We’ve been in touch with other food service operations people and it’s just, it makes it a lot easier to take knocks like this flood when you have the support of your community. So we’re super grateful for that.

Q: Well, Jane Kupersmith, co-owner of Hopscotch Coffee and Rainbow Bakery – thank you so much for your time.

A: Yeah, thanks Kade.

***

The Monroe County Emergency Management Office released a statement encouraging residents and business owners who have been affected by the June 19th flood to report their flood damage. Residents can report damage over the phone by calling 211, or online by visitingin211.org and clicking on the Monroe County Storm and Flood Damage Assessment button in the top bar.

Other organizations you can contact for help with flood relief include the Monroe County Emergency Management Office via phone at 812-349-2546 from 9 to 4 p.m., and the Community Organizations Active in Disaster in Monroe County via email at [email protected].

As for the City of Bloomington, you can also contact 812-349-3400 for flood emergencies.

Credits:

Kade Young, Robert Robinson, Jake Jacobson, Benedict Jones and Katherine Patterson