Emptied Wis. lake drains dollars
Local attractions have lost 'attractive centerpiece' of tourism to floods.
LAKE DELTON, Wis. -- One car after another pulls into the parking lot at a small public beach on the edge of Lake Delton. Swimming, though, is not on the agenda for the families who clamber out. They're here to gaze at an empty lake.
"Wow! It looks like Armageddon," Harold Brown, a truck driver from Shawano, Wis., says as he, wife Kari and daughter Courtney, 12, get their first view of this tourist mecca's newest attraction.
The 267-acre lake drained June 9 after rain caused flooding that broke through its banks and into the Wisconsin River, creating a chasm that toppled homes and severed a road. Video of the tumbling houses was widely televised, conveying the scope and drama of flooding across the Midwest.
Shanan Peters, an assistant geology professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, says the rate of rainfall was more than a spillway near a dam could handle, though neither failed. What probably happened, he says, is that excess water flowed to a low point in the lakebed and saturated sandy soil beneath the road until it gave way.
The lake won't be refilled until spring. Its disappearance is a terrible blow for this village, population 1,982, and next-door Wisconsin Dells, which has 2,418 residents. People already were worried that gas prices would keep vacationers away. The area hosts 3.1 million visitors a year. They spend $1.03 billion and support 23,911 jobs, the Wisconsin Dells Visitor & Convention Bureau says.
Water parks, miniature golf courses, go-cart tracks and scores of other attractions lure families here, but Lake Delton was a sparkling natural centerpiece of the area. Motels, resorts and condos line its shore. It was full of fat walleye, boats and swimmers.
Now it's a muddy landscape pocked with tree stumps. Volunteers removed trash from the lakebed, and birds plucked up the fish, so there's little odor, but it's a stark sight, not a beautiful one.
Businesses hit hard
Colleen Martini of Schaumburg, Ill., brought her camera. "You've really got to see it. It's kind of like the Grand Canyon," she says. Her family has vacationed in the Dells area for 50 years and didn't consider going elsewhere. "This is kind of history," says Troy Carpenter, a carpenter from Danville, Ill.
