Canal Park Recovers After Storm

Businesses are back open as crews begin assessing infrastructure damage

DULUTH, Minn. – A normal fall day in Canal Park; sunshine, tourists walking along the shore.

It’s a sharp contrast from the fury on Lake Superior only one day before.

“She’s like holy cow look at all the waves and stuff and it progressively got worse and worse and worse and so we decided to come out here and take a couple pictures last night,” said J.P. Rademacher, who came to Duluth for his honeymoon with his wife, Miquela.

The fierce storm made the Rademachers trip even more memorable.

“We were going to go walk the boardwalk but half of it’s kind of torn up so we’ll kind of make our adventure that way and look and see,” said Rademacher.

Now, the sound of machines cleaning up the debris that covers the Lakewalk and parking lots is the only clue of the devastating conditions here not long ago.

“We’re close to the lake. It’s the pro and the con,” said Jill Toms, General Manager of Grandma’s Saloon and Grill in Canal Park.

Grandma’s was shut down because of flooding around their building and in their basement.

“In years past we never closed but recently just to keep our employees safe and our customers safe, we’ve gone the other direction with it,” said Toms. “We’ve maybe closed once a year.”

Across the street, Vikre Distillery was closed with a few inches of standing water in their bar area.

“We did what we could to raise things up, get them out of the path of the water, but we were sitting at home last night thinking I wonder what it looks like down there,” said Vikre owner, Joel Vikre.

The businesses along South Lake Avenue are now open again, virtually unaffected by the feet of water drowning the street on Wednesday.

With high lake levels, they’ve been forced to take extra precautions to be ready for storms.

“Last year we installed eight additional pumps down there and we can move literally thousands of gallons of water a minute down there but we still had a little water in the basement,” said Toms.

It’s a new reality that goes along with being so close to the greatest great lake.

“We all have the sense that the weather seems to be getting more and more extreme so it does make us worry a little bit about the future,” said Vikre.

The storms continue to cause destruction to the shoreline and the city has just begun to assess the damage from the most recent blast.