Flooding in Wisner, Nebraska.
GOVERNOR PETE RICKETTS: RECOVERING FROM NEBRASKA’S HISTORIC FLOODS
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Kris Polly: Governor, please tell us about the effect of the floods on Nebraska’s infrastructure and how the recovery is going. Pete Ricketts: The flooding has been the most widespread disaster in our state history. Thousands of people have been displaced, whole towns have been evacuated, and some towns
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have been entirely cut off. Some people whose homes were damaged still have not been able to move back in. At one point during the peak of the flood, a third of our 10,000 miles of state highways were closed. Within about a week, that number had dropped to about 275 miles. Eleven miles of road are still closed. Fifteen bridges were out; 12 are still out; and 27 are in need of repair. Two hundred miles of paving needs to be repaired. The flood also wiped out dams and dikes. We don’t yet have a complete list of all the damage to county roads; they are still being assessed. It is going to take a while for us to recover from this, since this infrastructure can’t be quickly fixed. For example, we hope to have temporary structures up by August to replace two bridges on Highway 12 and Highway 281. But it will take until sometime next year before we actually have permanent solutions in place. In total, we have about $160 million worth of needed repairs for our highway system and local roads just along federal aid routes. We estimate that we also have about
PHOTO COURTESY OF THE STATE OF NEBRASKA.
he heavy rainfall and snowmelt that hit Nebraska in March caused the worst flooding in Nebraska’s history. All of the state’s major rivers—the Missouri, the Platte, the Elkhorn, the Loup, and the Niobrara—reached record heights, flooding homes and farmland. Dams, levees, and bridges were destroyed; livestock were washed away. Thousands of Nebraskans had to be evacuated. Governor Pete Ricketts declared that the floods had caused “the most extensive damage our state has ever experienced.” Governor Ricketts joins Municipal Water Leader Editor-inChief Kris Polly this month to discuss the flood’s effects and how the state is responding to the damage and leading the recovery.
