One day in August 2025, Kevin Shafer looks out the window and notices it’s pouring buckets of rain outside. He’s shocked, because it’s way more than what the forecast predicted.
“I could see the clouds over the downtown area, I thought, ‘Yeah, this is not good,’” Shafer said.
Kevin is the head of the Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District. Basically, he’s the guy who oversees sewage and flood management for over one million Milwaukee area residents. It’s a job that requires him to always be on.
“ It's Kevin sitting in his underwear at a computer, at home writing on a pad of paper these numbers and going, ‘Okay, what are we gonna do?’” he said.
This isn’t any old rain storm though. It’s so huge it’s called a thousand-year storm by weather experts. Some areas of Milwaukee get 14 inches of rain. And Kevin knows his sewer system is no match. He has to make the call: send the sewage into people’s basements or into Lake Michigan. Even after over 20 years on the job, it’s a decision that brings him to tears.
“I wish I had it controlled,” he said. “I'm still as emotional as I was before.”
Part of that is due to the checkered history of the Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District. A legacy that Kevin has turned around.
Credits:
Host/Producer: Dan Wanschura
Editor: Morgan Springer
Additional Editing: Peter Payette, Ellie Katz, Claire Keenan-Kurgan, Austin Rowlader
Music: Blue Dot Sessions
Additional sound: Freesound
Transcript:
DAN WANSCHURA, BYLINE: This is Points North. A podcast about the land, water, and inhabitants of the Great Lakes. I’m Dan Wanschura.
This is a story about a guy named Kevin Shafer. He’s obsessed with rain. That’s because he oversees the sewage and flood management in Milwaukee.
And when I say sewage, I’m talkin’ pretty gross stuff: pee, poop, the water from your shower, the sour milk you pour down the drain.
In other words, it’s Kevin’s job to make sure that sewage soup ends up in treatment plants. And not in rivers, Lake Michigan or people’s basements.
So it makes sense Kevin is obsessed with rain. And he tracks it all the time. Every morning at 6 o'clock he checks his inbox for this detailed weather forecast.
KEVIN SHAFER: I look at it even on weekends.
WANSCHURA: It predicts the amount of rain for that day and the next seven. So, in August 2025, on a Saturday, he opens this email and starts to read. And he finds out the expected rainfall for the day isn’t much. It’s less than half an inch. It’s pretty similar for the next day, too.
SHAFER: And I thought, okay, we're fine. You know, that's not much rain. If we're less than two inches, I don't worry about it too much.
WANSCHURA: Kevin continues with his Saturday. Eventually, he and his family end up at a pizza joint for dinner. They get seated, start eating and it’s here during their meal, Kevin looks outside and notices it’s pouring. Like buckets of rain.
SHAFER: It was kind of a shock because based on the forecast we'd received that morning, we would've been fine. So I was a little, uh, surprised.
WANSCHURA: Kevin’s got a classic Midwest vibe. Pretty understated. So when he says he was a little surprised, what he really means is:
SHAFER: Scared, shocked, mad.
WANSCHURA: That’s because heavy rain can overwhelm the sewer system and it could overflow. And that could mean billions of gallons of sewage dumped into Milwaukee’s waterways. They finish dinner. Kevin gets the car. (Gets totally soaked, by the way.) Picks up his wife and kids. And heads home.
SHAFER: I think my wife would tell you, I kind of get in the zone where I don't talk a whole lot. 'cause I'm always already thinking about what I gotta do. So, it was probably a pretty quiet drive home. … And as I'm driving down to my house, and I could see the clouds over the downtown area, I thought, “Yeah, this is not good.”
WANSCHURA: Because that rainstorm is quickly turning into what’s called a thousand-year storm. The chances of it happening in a given year are one in a thousand.
SHAFER: We got in the house and I just went immediately to the office, turned on the computer … I get on the phone … I call our outreach person and say, “Okay, I think we're gonna have a problem tonight. Just be ready for it.”
WANSCHURA: And it’s Kevin’s job as the head of the Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District to figure out what to do next.
WANSCHURA: Alright, so if you’re like me, you might not be an expert on city sewer systems. But they’re kind of cool. Say you flush something down the toilet. (sound of toilet flushing) That waste goes from your house (water running through pipe sound) to the sewer, which is a pipe (sound of water in sewer). Then the sewage flows to a bigger sewer which empties into larger ones, all the way down the line until it reaches the wastewater treatment plant (sound of wastewater treatment plant). There the water gets cleaned and delivered back to, in this case, Lake Michigan (sounds of Lake Michigan).
But the amount of wastewater Kevin has to deal with isn’t always the same, especially if there’s a lot of rain and stormwater runoff. So Milwaukee has this backup system. It's called the Deep Tunnel.
ELEVATOR OPERATOR: Alright, we’re going down.
(sounds of elevator going down)
WANSCHURA: We get in an elevator and go 300 feet underground.
The Deep Tunnel is basically this giant holding tank underneath the normal sewer system.
SHAFER: So we’re at the downstream end of the Deep Tunnel. So all the water flows to this point, and then we pump it up.
WANSCHURA: The Deep Tunnel can hold 521 million gallons of water. The whole system is over 28 miles long.
SHAFER: This is a pump unit and this is a pump unit. … And so when the pumps come on, they’ll take that water and they’ll pump it up 330 feet. And it goes right into the primary treatment system … so then it’s all treated before it goes to the lake. … If the pumps were on right now, we’d be yelling, because they’re very loud. But we’re lucky they’re not on right now.
WANSCHURA: When there’s a big rainstorm, Kevin can take pressure off the regular sewer system by routing stormwater and sewage here into the Deep Tunnel. That prevents a sewage backup into homes and businesses or an overflow into the environment.
WANSCHURA: And it’s not too smelly.
SHAFER: No. See I told ya! Everyone goes, “Oh it must stink.” I go, “I don’t smell it.”
WANSCHURA: But sometimes the Deep Tunnel fills all the way up. And when that happens, Kevin has one option: a sewage overflow. That means pathogens like bacteria and viruses spilling into rivers and even Lake Michigan —stuff like E. coli and Salmonella.
WISN NEWS REPORTER TERRY SATER: Dr. Sandra McLellan is a researcher with Milwaukee’s Great Lakes Water Institute.SANDRA MCLELLAN: And we really want to get at how long is that bacteria staying in the water column, and how long is it a threat to the beaches.
WANSCHURA: And if there’s one thing Kevin hates – it’s that.
SHAFER: So you've got a watershed with 1.1 million people. You. And they're expecting perfection. They want everything to work. So you do what you can. Um, but you know that you're limited and, um, you put everything into it.
WANSCHURA: He chokes up for a minute, which kind of catches me off guard.
SHAFER: So anyway. You gotta cut all this out. You gotta cut all this out.
WANSCHURA: I don’t know, it's, it's … like I don't know that everybody has that level of care.
WANSCHURA: So back to that huge storm in August. It’s Saturday night and things are getting more tense.
SHAFER: It's Kevin sitting in his underwear at a computer, at home writing on a pad of paper these numbers and going, “Okay, what are we gonna do?”
WANSCHURA: He’s hoping for good news on the radar. That the rain will stop. But it just keeps coming. The Deep Tunnel is filling up fast. And that’s when it hits him.
SHAFER: I was probably on the phone from like nine o'clock on just talking about how the system was reacting, where the flows were coming from, and you just see it coming higher and higher. And so you say, “Okay, we're gonna have an overflow.”
WANSCHURA: Around 10 that night, he gives the command for a sewage overflow.
SHAFER: You just see all the water that was coming in the tunnel…now going to the lake and to the rivers.
WANSCHURA: And before Kevin’s night is over, it’s actually gonna get even worse.
(Points North Fan Club message)
WANSCHURA: Historically, the Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District didn’t have a lot of fans. It had a bad reputation. Until the early 90s, the city was notorious for sewage overflows. Almost every time it rained there was an overflow.
SHAFER: We had carp and that was about the only fish that would live in our rivers. Everything else was dead.
WANSCHURA: Kevin says the habitat along the rivers was pretty gnarly too. It got contaminated with lots of industrial waste.
SHAFER: It was an open sewer, basically. Because, you know, 365 days a year and you're having overflows 50 to 60 of those days. That’s not good.
WANSCHURA: We’re talking like eight to nine billion gallons of sewage and stormwater — a year. And the Sewerage District was getting the blame. Residents were not happy. But when the Clean Water Act became law in 1972, Milwaukee and a bunch of other cities had to find a fix.
SHAFER: The Clean Water Act passed and all of a sudden you went from, “Okay, it's okay to have as many as you want” to “Whoop, you gotta stop 'em.”
WANSCHURA: Milwaukee’s solution to this problem was to build that Deep Tunnel. Again, that giant underground holding tank. They built it in 1993. And it worked. Instead of 50 to 60 overflows a year, the Deep Tunnel cut that number down to less than six — which was the limit imposed by the Environmental Protection Agency.
Kevin says the Deep Tunnel was never built to completely stop overflows from happening. It was built as more of a water quality tunnel to help capture the most toxic pollutants during that first big flush of surface runoff. Then the overflow into waterways would be mostly rainwater.
SHAFER: What we saw was almost immediate improvement in the water quality in the rivers. There was not the stuff floating in the rivers that we had before. We saw fish reviving in the waterways. So it was almost– it was spectacular to see nature respond to this cleaning effort.
WANSCHURA: But what wasn’t immediate was a change in people’s feelings about the Sewerage District. They had paid a lot of money for this new Deep Tunnel, and they didn’t get why overflows were still happening. The reality is, some of the overflows couldn’t be avoided, but some actually could. That’s because back then, the Deep Tunnel was operated by an algorithm. And it just wasn’t very accurate. Sometimes the algorithm would trigger an overflow when the tunnel wasn’t even full.
SHAFER: So we'd have an overflow, the tunnel would be half full, and the rain would stop. And then the next day the media was all over us like, “You still had half the tunnel. Why did you have an overflow?” … They put all this money into the sanitary sewer system, and this is improvements of the treatment plants, building the deep tunnel, all kinds of stuff. They put $3 billion into it, and they did not want to see overflows when that system still had capacity to hold water.
WANSCHURA: But since the Sewerage District was still well under the six overflow limit each year, it didn’t really worry about a few here and there. The mindset of the agency was, “There used to be 60 of these a year. Now it’s less than six. No big deal, right?”
SHAFER: There was a lot of scrutiny placed on the district through that time period.
WANSCHURA: So much scrutiny, that when Kevin became the executive director of the Sewerage District in 2002, he got a new nickname.
SHAFER: I walked down the train on Amtrak heading to Chicago one day, and they go, “Oh, there's the dumper. And I'm like, “Oh great.”
WANSCHURA: Somebody said that?
SHAFER: Oh yeah. Oh yeah. I'm like, “Hi. I am the dumper.” Yeah.
WANSCHURA: It wasn’t any better for his employees.
SHAFER: I had employees say, I'd say, “So what'd you do this weekend?” They go, “Well, we went to a party,” and they said, “people would ask us where we worked.” And they'd say, “Well, McDonald's.”
WANSCHURA: Kevin says they’d have monitoring crews out in unmarked vehicles, because employees didn’t want the public to know who they worked for.
SHAFER: It was pretty bad.
WANSCHURA: Even though water quality got a lot better, people still thought of the Sewerage District as polluting the water.
SHAFER: I had to change the ethos of the district. … And I had to hammer in that, “No, an overflow is bad no matter what.”
WANSCHURA: One of the very first things Kevin did when he became executive director in 2002, was to replace the faulty algorithm that controlled the Deep Tunnel. And he replaced it with himself.
SHAFER: I said, “Well, if we're gonna be blamed for an overflow, I'm gonna be the one that makes the decision … I'm not gonna let the algorithm run it.”
WANSCHURA: Kevin didn’t really know what he was getting into. But now he does. It means late nights watching radar, chugging coffee, and sweating it out about eight to 10 times a year. It’s all on his shoulders now.
SHAFER: If we're gonna get blamed for the overflow, I'm gonna be the one making that decision 'cause I'm the one that's gonna be in the cameras the next day.
WANSCHURA: When Kevin deals with a sewage overflow, there’s kind of a priority list he runs through in his head: homes first, businesses second, the environment third.
SHAFER: To see people walking around in their basements that are full of sewage, it's a severe public health risk. And I will protect the public: first choice every time. … I don't wanna sacrifice the environment for that, but knowing what I know about the quality of the water that's gonna come out from an overflow, I'll do more to protect the homes and the businesses than I will the environment at that point.
WANSCHURA: Now, it’s the early morning hours between 2 and 3 a.m. That huge August storm just keeps on going. And right in the middle of it, Kevin watches as another, even bigger rain system rolls through and dumps on Milwaukee.
He was hoping the water treatment plants would be able to catch up, but that’s not gonna happen. Around threein the morning, Kevin makes the call to close some other sewers leading to the Deep Tunnel. It’s filled to the brim with 521 million gallons of sewage and stormwater runoff.
From that point on, anything entering the sewer system is headed for the Milwaukee River and Lake Michigan. It’s his only option.
SHAFER: It was just, it was one of those times where, okay, you've done everything you can, everything's still working, but Mother Nature just came in with too much. So at that point, you're just holding on, waiting for the rain to stop.
WANSCHURA: Around five in the morning, Kevin finally heads to bed, tries to get a little sleep. Later that morning, the Milwaukee mayor’s office calls a press conference. Kevin’s supposed to be there. He hops in his truck, but gets stuck in traffic. He finds out the highway is flooded. He ends up listening to the press conference on the radio.
CITY ENGINEER AT PRESS CONFERENCE: We had 14 inches of rain in this location right here, which is an intense amount in a short period of time. So, there’s no sewer system across the country that can maintain that amount. (fade down)
SHAFER: City engineers…they got up there and said, “You know, we're not built for this type of storm. This type of storm is one that you don't ever want to live through. And unfortunately we did.”
CITY ENGINEER AT PRESS CONFERENCE: As we move forward and the rain starts to dissipate, it’ll start going out. I know I had water in my basement, I’m pretty sure a lot of the folks behind me had water in their basements. It’s just the amount of volume that came so fast. It’s an intensity issue.
WANSCHURA: Whenever there’s an overflow, Kevin is always concerned about what the public is gonna think.
SHAFER: Sometimes the aftermath of the storm is worse than the storm – the public response to it.
WANSCHURA: But the overall response to this overflow is different.
SHAFER: Everyone kind of understood that, you know, this is a big storm.
FOX 6 NEWS REPORTER SAM KRAEMER: Backed up basements, raging rivers, and cars floating – even underwater – on state highways. The damage from the weekend storm is widespread. The Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District says it could have even been worse without 28 miles of storage buried underground, known as the Deep Tunnel.
WANSCHURA: There was more than $33 million dollars in damage to Milwaukee and surrounding areas from this storm. State officials reported 1,500 homes were destroyed or had major damage due to flooding. And over five billion gallons of sewage overflowed into rivers and Lake Michigan as a result of the storm.
But despite all that, the overflow was mostly rainwater so there weren’t any fish die-offs or any other long-term environmental impacts that we know of. And Kevin Shafer and the Sewerage District get a lot of the credit for that.
Now, they’re recognized nationally, as leaders in sewage and flood management. Thanks to projects like the Deep Tunnel, the Sewerage District has captured and cleaned over 98% of all the stormwater and wastewater that's entered the system since 1994. The goal nationally is way less: 85%.
Besides the Deep Tunnel, part of that success is because Milwaukee has replaced concrete water channels with natural landscapes, there are more green roofs, and some residents even have rain buckets. All things that can absorb and capture stormwater before it gets to the sewers. And that’s all because of Kevin’s vision.
When I was interviewing Kevin, I noticed this incredible wood carving of a mallard duck decoy in his office. He got it last year. It’s a national conservation achievement award from Ducks Unlimited.
BRIAN GLENZINSKI: Kevin's really been forward thinking in and taking more of a watershed approach to everything. The big tunnel is one solution, but another solution is to get out in the watershed and catch the water up in basins, scattered throughout the landscape.
WANSCHURA: Brian Glenzinski works in conservation with Ducks Unlimited.
GLENZINSKI: And to see all that stuff start to come together and solve their problem and also make the community such a better place for everybody to live, that's the kind of stuff that– it takes time and, and a vision. And, and I think Kevin had that and, and has made it happen.
WANSCHURA: An example of how things have changed since Kevin Shafer took this job over 20 years ago. He doesn’t get called “the dumper” anymore. His employees take pride in their jobs. Their work vehicles have their logos on them. And now the Sewerage District averages just over two overflows a year.
SHAFER: And I think a lot of that is this ethic of, “Do every damn thing you can to stop an overflow. Do everything you can to improve stormwater runoff and everything you can to make sure the plants treat the wastewater the way they're supposed to.”
WANSCHURA: Kevin and the Sewerage District have gone from being known as the polluter of the waterways to the protector. But it’s come at a cost.
SHAFER: I'm very emotional about this and I think there is [an] impact to me. And so I've told folks as a joke, I said, “Yeah, I'm gonna have to have therapy to have for PTSD to just recover from some of this.” And as you saw, it's gonna impact me. And I wish I had it controlled, but 24 years later, I'm still as emotional as I was before.
WANSCHURA: I think this is so cool, Kevin, that you have this job that people would say like, “Oh, it's out of your control. Like, what can you do about it?” But you're still so emotionally invested in, I don't know, the environment, the community. Put your finger on it for me. Why? Why do you care that much?
SHAFER: Well, my kids are gonna live here. Everyone else's kids are gonna live here. I want to live in a place that's as clean as it can be, as natural as it can be.
WANSCHURA: That may sound simple for a guy who gets so emotional about it, but like I said, Kevin’s a little understated.
