Ellison Bay copes with disruption
Ellison Bay copes with disruption; Normal life on hold while explosion investigation continues
By Paul Srubas, Green Bay Press Gazette
ELLISON BAY — Its comparative quietness traditionally has set Ellison Bay apart from many other Door County communities.
Although every bit a bustling resort town, it typically doesn’t experience the crush of tourist traffic that you’d find on a July day in some of the more southern communities along Wisconsin 42, the western shoreline forming the inside edge of the “thumb” of the Door County peninsula.
“We’ve been coming here for 36 years,” said Alfred Hantke of Menomonee Falls. “We like Ellison Bay because it’s quieter than Fish Creek and the others.”
But since propane gas explosions destroyed three buildings, killed two people and injured several others in the heart of Ellison Bay early Monday morning, the community is finding itself more “set apart” from its neighbors than ever before.
Wooden barricades and a spider web of police caution tape segregated the community’s downtown district all week as police, fire and now insurance investigators probe for a cause and source of the blasts. The happy parade of pedestrian tourists that slow traffic in places like Fish Creek or even nearby Sister Bay is nonexistent in downtown Ellison Bay, which appears to be abandoned except for the array of public safety and heavy equipment operators that have been working the accident scene. The most bustling part of town has been the sheriff’s department command center, a trailer equipped with a satellite dish, fax machines and other gear, parked at the corner of Wisconsin 42 and Mink River Basin Road.
Drivers can’t use Wisconsin 42 through the downtown, so businesses have been closed. Residents weren’t able to get to their homes for much of the week. People like Alfred and Gisalla Hantke haven’t been able to get to their boats, moored in public and private slips west of the blast zone.
Retail shops and restaurants trapped within the boundaries of the police barricades obviously have suffered loss of business. But oddly, so have those just outside the police boundaries.
Clay Bay Pottery is too far south to have been affected directly by the explosions or by the worries of lingering propane gas that kept much of the downtown in a stranglehold all week. But that business and several others have been hurt instead by media coverage and by a traffic detour that takes motorists around the affected downtown area and back onto 42 at a point north of Ellison Bay. Tourists apparently have been avoiding the whole area.
Although July is Door County’s busiest month, traffic in front of the pottery shop has been more typical of April, according to Clay Bay owner David Aurelius.
“We’d probably be seeing three to four times as much traffic out here” if not for the explosions and road blockage, he said.
The story is much the same north of the police barricades, north all the way into Gills Rock at the tip of the Door peninsula.
“It’s been pretty quiet up here all week,” said Lynn Hass, owner of Hedgehog Gifts in Gills Rock. “We should be at our peak right now. I’d say we’re down at least 30 percent — but that’s just a guess. People see the road is closed and they turn around and go home.”
Perception is almost entirely the problem, said Larry “Thor” Thoreson, owner of Gills Rock Stoneware. Despite its name, the shop is in northern Ellison Bay and, in fact, finds itself rather conveniently located right at the spot where the designated detour rejoins Wisconsin 42. But business has been slow, Thoreson said.
“The first couple days after the explosions, a lot of people were coming in, but there has been so much information out about all the stores being closed, and the highway, it’s been sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy.
“The last few days have been very quiet.”
He and other businesses have banded together to publicize that their stores remain open. They’ve posted information at the detour routes. It remained to be seen what impact the postings would have.
It’s especially tough on businesses that are open only seasonally, because a few days’ loss represents a large percentage of a business’s total take, Thoreson said.
Consider the Linden Gallery, which, in the heart of the downtown district, was entirely cut off from business all week until Friday, when the barricaded area was reduced slightly. The high-end operation, which attracts national attention because of its specialty of ancient Asian artifacts, can average $4,000 a day in sales, said co-owner Brian Linden. The four days of its forced closure thus would mean a loss of $16,000, he said.
Despite the obvious hardships, business owners were largely upbeat.
Jeanee Linden, the other owner of the Linden Gallery, said the disaster has unified the community in a new and powerful way. She likened the effect to the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center; the adversity has strengthened people’s ties, she said.
“I just want everybody to remain positive like that,” she said.
“Maybe it’s not really lost business — just postponed,” Brian Linden added. “We’re dealing with 2,000-year-old ceramics … if it doesn’t sell, it only grows in value, and suddenly it’s 2,001 years old.”
At Clay Bay, where the ceramics were considerably less old, the pottery wheels have been spinning busily all week.
“Who knows?” Aurelius said. “Maybe more people will come in fall or August …When people do come in, the show room’s going to look great.”
Thoreson summed up what many of the business owners have been saying.
“I’m not complaining,” he said. “In light of what happened here, it’s pretty much small potatoes. And I think that’s pretty true of everybody in town. They’re shocked by what happened, very much thinking about the families that were affected, particularly (the family of the Michigan couple that were killed in one explosion).
“As inconvenient as it all is, we’ll be just fine.”