Tallies of damages may lead to recovery money

A lot of damage was caused due to the flooding this past week in New Richland. Cleanup efforts will be ongoing for quite a while. Teams of officials will be coming around town on Thursday through Saturday (Oct. 1 to 3) to talk to folks to get a dollar estimate of damages and also to use this info to apply for funding at the federal level. The groups will go door to door and business to business. Hopefully, responses will help ensure folks can get some money to reimburse them for the many costs that are coming out of the flooding.  

 

During the week, kids from the local high school spent many hours on cleanup. 

 

Senator Amy Klobuchar put out a statement this week that the time is now for putting money into infrastructure to fix New Richland’s waterflow problems: She said she had directed her office to work with the local city and county to find funding to do so. Hopefully the studies that were paid for in order to look for grant money to fix the infrastructure around town will now finally be put to good use. 

 

Talking with local folks, I have heard of at least one business with damages over $100,000. We do not know what it will cost to clean up and rejuvenate the care center. Another huge loss to the local economy: more than 80 care center employees are without jobs for the next six months or more as work gets underway. 

 

The entire first floor of the apartments across from Budach’s Implement must now be gutted and repaired. 

 

Ten to 12 houses are deemed a total loss. 

 

There have been thousands and thousands of dollars of damages to more than 300, maybe even 400 homes in New Richland. 

 

The time is now to fix this problem as permanently as possible. 

 

I am grateful my home and place of employment were not affected directly. One or two or three floods ago, my Dad’s basement flooded for the first time ever. After clearing everything out, he basically left it as an empty space. So, yes, water came in, but there was nothing for it to harm.  

 

Others were not so lucky.

 

My final real thoughts on this are that I do expect lasting change to be made. I spoke with a number of  county commissioners and have read so so many news articles. It will take time. I just pray that we don’t endure another round of damage in the meantime.