FEMA teams in the Ozarks survey Memorial Day storm damage
MISSOURI — FEMA teams are in the Ozarks this week, survey damage reports from Memorial Day weekend storms and flooding.
'They are going through the five impacted counties from the May 23 through May 26 storms, and they're looking at damage to public infrastructure, roadways, if there's public buildings or any public utilities that might have been damaged from those storms,' Ryan Lowry-Lee with FEMA said.
OzarksFirst shadowed the FEMA team in Dade County and spoke to Presiding Commissioner Kim Kinder about the damage that remains.
'When we have major flooding because it is the Sac River it's connected to Stockon Lake, so if it's flooded, at Stockton Lake, they let water out and stuff, it all rises. So we've had to deal with that in the past and they can take out the whole road there. It has in the past. It's quite a bit and it's causing people to have to drive an extra 5 to 10 miles around, you know, to get to their work and stuff like that.'
Lowry-Lee says their teams are looking at public assistance, not for damage done on private property.
'The state's requested it as damage assessments just for the public assistance, which is those public infrastructure pieces,' Lowry-Lee said. 'What happens after a storm like this if the state determines that there's damage and that's damage to public infrastructure, that they could submit a request for a disaster declaration, we link up with them, do the damage assessment.'
Kinder believes Dade County has certainly met its threshold.
'We're a rural county. We're kind of a poor county and with the amount of damages and stuff that we've had, our current threshold to meet for a FEMA project is around $33,000. We're estimating now over $200,000 that we've had, so that's a big impact to our budget here in the county since our road budget isn't that huge.'
'When a disaster declaration is approved for public assistance, there is no set dollar amount that it's approved for. There's generally a cost share involved. So it's generally 75% federal and 25% local and state concessionaire. So again, it just depends on what those damages are. As the state puts together those projects and begins to make repairs to address those damages, it's a reimbursement on the public assistance side,' Lowry-Lee said.
Kinder says she's hoping the roads will be back to normal soon.
'We are rural. There's not a million people that live on the road, but every person counts here in Dade County, so we try to get it together as quickly as we can,' Kinder said.
FEMA teams were also in Ozark County on Tuesday, and teams are expected to be in Douglas, Webster and Vernon counties throughout later this week.
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