-By Bob Wade, DAT Night Team Leader/Supervisor — ARC of SE Wisconsin — Milwaukee, WI.

4:20am — Friday, January 4, 2008:

My DAT cell phone rings; The Milwaukee Fire Department (MFD) has requested our assistance at 10215 W Fond du Lac Avenue,” states the duty worker.

“That’s all the information they gave me,” she says.

I have no idea what type of call I’m getting dressed for that early in the morning.  If it’s a fire, they usually say that.

It’s 3 degrees outside, with a crystal clear night sky above me as I jump into the van.

I go to turn the key in the ignition of the van and it doesn’t move. IT’S LOCKED!!!

I try to get it to unlock for about 5 minutes….”Arrrrrgh!!!”  This has never happened before.  There’s no unlock button on the steering column!

It is time to call my teammates and get them responding ahead of me. There’s nothing about this call coming across my police scanner so it must not be a fire.

I tell Geri and Kayti about my little problem and they each give advice on how to solve it.  “Tried that…yep and I tried that…”

After about 15 minutes, and two additional phone calls for assistance later, the key in the ignition suddenly turns and I’m finally on my way!

This call is up in the land of the lost. Well, it’s where I always get lost anyway, way up on the NW side of Milwaukee.  I have my new handy-dandy GPS Navigator programmed with the address and this time I don’t get lost.

Geri & Kayti are already at the scene when I arrive there. It’s a flooded apartment call.

The cold temperatures outside have caused a floor radiator heater water pipe to burst in a vacant apartment on the 2nd floor and there’s water pouring down into the (thankfully) vacant unit below.

MFD has seemingly chosen the lesser of two evils and decided to leave the water running, as opposed to turning the water off to the entire wing of the apartment complex, probably knowing that if they turned the water off, then all of the pipes would freeze, causing even worse damage than just the water running down from the 2nd floor. They’ve also turned the boiler furnace off to the entire wing of the apartment building.

We enter an exterior door of the building and a blast of steam pours out upon our faces.  The water running through the radiators pipes is still hot. Water starts to drip off of our helmets from the condensation.

Kayti notices something running across the floor as we enter the vacant first floor unit.

It’s a turtle!!

There’s trash and remnants of the previous tenants existence there all over the floor of this apartment; clothing and broken toys across the living room rug, chicken bones strewn across the kitchen floor.

We greet the woman living next door and politely ask her what she would like us to do for her.  I’m still not sure why we were called there at that moment. I’m not really even sure if I’m quite all of the way awake yet.

“The heat is turned off. I have my three kids here with me…” she frightfully explains.

”OK. Now I know why we’re here,” I think to myself.

My teammates and I discuss the shelter options with our now client. No place for her to go.  We need a hotel room.

Before we go back outside to the van to fill out the paper work for this family, I decide to take a better look at where this water is coming from.

With my flashlight, I walk into the 1st floor vacant apartment unit and notice that MFD has ripped most of the living room ceiling down and I can see water pouring down from in-between the floorboards above. The wood itself is starting to bulge and it looks like the floor itself might even collapse.

The turtle runs away from us.  Kayti says she’s going to get a box and take it to the Humane Society.

“How in the world has this turtle survived this long?” we think out loud. The next-door neighbor told us that the people living there moved out about a month ago.

Kayti puts the turtle into a box and takes it with her.  She calls the Humane Society and they tell her to take it to MADACC (Milwaukee Area Domestic Control Center) and she does.

They will keep it for awhile, and then put it up for adoption if no one claims it.

While at work yesterday, I text-messaged Kayti and ask her how our turtle was doing.

She said she has named it, “Noah,” because we found it during a flood.

Noah is very independent, likes living alone and seems to just love chicken!  She (or he) especially loves it when water pipes break in the floors above her…and she’s up for adoption at MADACC here in Milwaukee.If no one else wants her, we’re going to adopt her ourselves, give her a tiny little DAT helmet and have her go to fire calls with us in the future…and if the van’s key ignition switch ever freezes up on me again, Noah might even get to the scene faster than I do!

Filed under: Disaster Response, Volunteers