Year after flooding, Dunnell is back better

DUNNELL - This time last year, a flash flood caused by an isolated storm that downpoured on Dunnell waterlogged their lift station, ruined their trash water pump and caused sewer water to back up into some people's homes. Now, they have picked up the pieces and put things on the right track.

While it had rained throughout the night of August 17, 2025, and into the morning of August 18, by 3 a.m., options had been exhausted and the rain got worse.

“We could not keep up anymore,” Public Works Director Andrew Dorschner said at the time. “We got pumps from Windom, Jackson and Sherburn. Once the storm drain filled up, we had to get a hold of the Minnesota duty officer and let everybody know we're going to have to dump our lift station to the storm drain, which is going into the local creeks. When you're getting stormwater coming back into the lift station, there's nowhere you can pump it. I was waist-deep in water.”

On top of all of this, roads were also damaged, as Dorschner said most of their roads are gravel. In the days and weeks after, Dorschner said there was plenty for them to do.

"A lot of samples for the state," he said. "Clean up, a lot of cleanup. We had to run samples for making sure we weren’t polluting water in our storm drains, streams and lakes. We had to make sure everything was cleaned up around town. There was a lot of debris and messes on the road."

Having already gone through flooding a year earlier, Dorschner said this was also a time when the community came together for each other.

"There was a lot of neighbors helping neighbors," he said. "They were helping each other clean up their basements. With the council and myself, we were focused on the infrastructure and trying to improve so this would never happen again. Bringing up new plans, discussing other options."

The damages ended up blowing by the state reimbursement threshold at the time of $47,259 and the federal threshold of $94,518. Because of this, Dorschner said state and federal funds were able to help in multiple areas.

"We got a new submersible pump, a hydraulic one that runs off the back of our tractor, so we can move our pump a little bit farther," he said. "They paid for wages that were spent dealing with this flood. They paid for repairs and electrical repairs on the community hall."

In the weeks and months after the flood, Dorschner said they leapt into finding the best way to approach issues caused and revealed by the flood.

"I started looking into different contractors and companies that could give us a deal or a better price for walls or an idea how to fix the lift station, how to make it so we wouldn’t have this issue again," he said. "It’s not fair to the citizens to have to deal with sewer backing up into their basements because of a flood. I reached out to my contacts in other cities, and we discussed how we could do that."

Because the lift station needs to work every day in Dunnell, Dorschner said that electrical piece was fixed pretty much right away. Ultimately, they chose to just raise walls around the lift station, as raising the whole lift station would have been much more expensive.

"Raising the lift station cost a lot more than putting walls around it," he said. "Just to raise the concrete rings that the pumps are sitting in, and the drywall is sitting in, and raising the control panel [would be a lot]. That would cause an issue where we’d have to build up to the control panel and to the doors to work on those."

The walls were put up around the lift station in July.

"It took a while, but I wanted to get it done before we had issues again," Dorschner said. "If it happened again, I wanted something done, and with the scheduling issues, it took a little while, but we got it."

Besides that, he said everything else has been taken care of, and a lot of it was done very quickly.

"The residents in town, several of them have gone through it two times now," Dorschner said. "They’ve gotten pretty efficient about fixing it. It’s not something that anybody wants to be efficient at, but I think they’ve done quite well. They’ve fixed a lot of their side of the stuff that needs to be fixed. We tried to help them out as much as we can."

With everything worked on and patched up, Dorschner said he and the city as a whole are now more prepared to face and fight off any future weather issues.

"I’ve learned a lot," he said. "My biggest goal is to make sure citizens don’t have to go through that again, and that’s why we built the wall."