Wisconsin
Noah Kahan’s sold-out Alpine Valley show in Wisconsin evacuated, postponed due to storms
Watch: Noah Kahan’s sold-out Wisconsin concert evacuated due to storms
People in the lawn at the sold-out, 37,000-person-capacity East Troy venue were told to evacuate to their cars due to impending storms.
A sold-out Noah Kahan show at Alpine Valley Music Theatre in East Troy on Saturday was partially evacuated due to storms before the folk-pop superstar took the stage.
The show was officially postponed at 10:15 p.m., according to a message on the Alpine Valley Facebook page, with an announcement made in the venue five minutes later. A new date will be announced on the venue’s social media pages, and previously purchased tickets will be honored for the new date.
At 8:07 p.m. Saturday, the first announcement was made over the amphitheater’s sound system that due to incoming storms, everyone seeing the show in the lawn “must seek shelters in their vehicles at this time,” while people seated in the covered pavilion were told they could shelter in place.
The announcement caused an uproar – with most people in the lawn not moving as of 8:18 p.m. The weather was still clear in East Troy at that time.
A second announcement was made at 8:29 p.m., but at that time, thousands in the lawn remained in place and the weather remained clear. Then at 8:45 p.m., fans in the lower bowl started singing Kahan songs like “Stick Season” and “Growing Sideways” a cappella, as well as “HOT TO GO!” by pop breakthrough Chappell Roan.
A third announcement was made at 8:55 p.m. “Folks, up in the lawn, again, we’ve got weather coming. Please seek shelter in your vehicle until the storm passes,” a crew member said on stage. About five minutes later the first strike of lightning hit the area, and the lawn started thinning out but thousands remained there as of 9:02 p.m.
Ten minutes later an announcer told people remaining on the lawn to come down in an orderly fashion to the covered seats. Winds picked up rapidly soon after that, and the first rumble of thunder hit at 9:14 p.m., followed by chants of “Noah.”
Adding to the complications: terrible phone and internet connections at the packed venue in rural Walworth County.
Ivy Bloomfield and Jillian Myers came to the show from Chicago, and since they didn’t have a car, were struggling to connect with their ride to update them on the show’s status.
“It’s scary,” Bloomfield said about the situation and struggling to connect with their parents, adding that the situation was “anxiety-inducing.”
Lennon Maher and Avery Tiller from Madison were trying desperately to connect with their parents. They were separated from them at the time of the evacuation order, and since they didn’t have keys to the family car, and were concerned they would be stuck in the unsheltered lawn parking when the storm hit, decided to hunker down in their seats. They were able to connect again in their seats around 10 p.m.
The amphitheater has about 7,500 seats in the sheltered sections closest to the stage, with the vast majority of seating available in the lawn. The amphitheater can accommodate up to 37,000 people.
Folk-pop breakout Kahan is slated to have one of the largest audiences of any artist in Wisconsin in 2024, par for the course for one of the most rapid ascents in recent years, thanks to his breakout album “Stick Season.”
In February 2023 he played a sold-out Miller High Life Theatre in Milwaukee for about 4,500 people – then four months later performed for one of the largest crowds ever assembled for a Summerfest side stage headliner at the Milwaukee festival’s UScellular Connection Stage.
This is the second concert at Alpine this year impacted by bad weather. Dave Matthews Band had to cancel a planned show June 22, part of a two-night stint. It was rescheduled for June 30.
Contact Piet at (414) 223-5162 or plevy@journalsentinel.com. Follow him on X at @pietlevy or Facebook at facebook.com/PietLevyMJS.
(WLUK) — Wisconsin State Patrol troopers are teaming up with truckers to better spot dangerous driving behaviors.
The annual Trooper in a Truck initiative kicks off next week in Wisconsin.
Troopers will ride along with with semitruck and bus drivers to use the higher vantage point to spot dangerous driving behaviors, especially near commercial motor vehicles.
Troopers will be looking for risky driving behaviors, including distracted driving, speeding, following too closely and seatbelt violations. When an officer identifies a violation from the truck or bus, they will radio to patrol cars in the area for appropriate enforcement action.
Drivers can expect to see Trooper in a Truck enforcement in the following areas:
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- Monday, July 13: Eau Claire
- Tuesday, July 14: Waukesha
- Wednesday, July 15: Madison
- Thursday, July 16: Green Bay
- Friday, July 17: Wausau
New Wisconsin athletic director Shawn Eichorst, who spent the last eight years at Texas, believes his new and old schools have much in common.
Both are well-regarded research universities in state capitals that belong to major conferences and have relatively similar enrollments.
He also pointed out one difference.
“There’s swag at Texas, right?” Eichorst said Tuesday during his introductory news conference. “There’s 30 million people in Texas. We’ve got swag, too, but we have a little humility with that deal. We need to get our shoulders up. We need to feel good about what it is that we’re doing.”
Wisconsin could gain more of that Texas swagger if its football program gets back to winning the way it did the last time Eichorst was employed in Madison. Eichorst, who most recently worked as a deputy athletic director at Texas, received a five-year deal worth $1.6 million annually, with provisions for increases and incentives. He was hired 2½ months after Chris McIntosh left to become the Big Ten’s deputy commissioner for strategy.
Eichorst worked at Wisconsin from 2006-11 when Barry Alvarez was AD and Bret Bielema was leading the football program. He followed that up with stints as an athletic director at Miami (2011-12) and Nebraska (2012-17) before Texas athletic director Chris Del Conte hired him in 2018.
He returns to Wisconsin with the Badgers coming off back-to-back losing seasons in football, a notable fall for a program that had 22 straight winning seasons from 2002-23. Wisconsin coach Luke Fickell has gone 17-21 after posting a 53-10 record with one College Football Playoff appearance in his last five years at Cincinnati.
Eichorst hasn’t worked with Fickell before but said he’s encouraged by their initial conversations.
“Obviously he’s won every place he’s been,” Eichorst said. “My expectation is more of me than him, meaning I need to pour into him, learn more about his program, how he has things set up, how his athletes are taken care of, how we’re supporting that endeavor. And then we can figure out, as we move along, what that might look like.”
Football struggles led to Eichorst’s downfall the last time he was an athletic director.
He fired Nebraska coach Bo Pelini in 2014 and hired Mike Riley, who had gone 93-80 in 14 seasons at Oregon State. Eichorst was dismissed shortly after Nebraska suffered an early-season loss to Northern Illinois in 2017. Riley was fired at the end of that season after going 19-19 in three years.
When Eichorst’s hiring was announced last week, he spoke about how much he had grown from that Nebraska stint. Wisconsin interim chancellor Eric Wilcots led the search and has emphasized Eichorst’s accomplishments at Texas, which has won the Learfield Directors’ Cup all-sports standings five times in the last six years.
Texas ranked anywhere from fifth to ninth in the Directors’ Cup standings in the five years before Wilcots’ arrival. Texas’ football team went a combined 23-27 from 2014-17 but has made two College Football Playoff appearances in the last three years.
“Everybody looks at the end result of what we did at Texas,” Eichorst said. “When we got there in 2018, we weren’t very good in a lot of areas. And that didn’t change overnight.”
Eichorst said one thing that has caught his attention about Wisconsin is the overall quality of its head coaches.
“You’re going to be as good as your coaches,” Eichorst said. “That’s it. If you have an elite group of coaches who are working together and uniting and galvanizing and learning from one another and taking it out to their individual programs, I think you can start to build something special. I go back to Texas. We built a room of really elite head coaches and put them at the top of everything we did to help guide us.”
Eichorst said this job is particularly important to him because of his Wisconsin roots. He was born in Lone Rock, about 45 miles northwest of the Madison campus.
He treasured his previous stint at Wisconsin and says he believes this school “represents everything that is great about higher education and college athletics.”
“Nobody will work harder for Wisconsin athletics,” Eichorst said. “I love this state, and I love everything that it represents. The passion is there. You can see it. I don’t have to make it up. I’ve lived it. It’s in my heart.”
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AP college sports: https://apnews.com/hub/college-sports
Wisconsin
South Milwaukee, Wisconsin, officials in standoff with homeowner over year-round skeleton display
The city of South Milwaukee, Wisconsin, has ordered a homeowner to take down his year-round giant skeleton display or face fines, but the homeowner is standing firm and refusing, even as the deadline to remove the display has passed.
Now there’s a skeleton standoff.
The city cited ordinance violations in their order for Sean Oster to dismantle the lawn decorations. The notice specifically references “large Halloween decorations being displayed not during the appropriate time of year.”
Oster was also ordered to make other improvements to his property.
But Oster has refused to take down the display, which is re-dressed as the year goes on and is currently sporting a Fourth of July theme. The Institute for Justice, a public interest law firm, has come to his aid, saying the city’s actions violate Oster’s First Amendment rights.
City administrators declined to comment, citing a pending investigation. Neighbors have been divided by the display; some say they’re fine with it, and think it brings fun and positivity to the neighborhood, but some others want to see it removed and say the lawn should be kept up better and more consistently.
Oster said he’s hoping to reach an agreement with the city, and said he’s corrected all other violations outside of the display.
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