Flood costs will top $1B as US Midwest still at risk
The US heartland, already coping with record floodwaters, may have to wait until next week for some relief.
Flooding that has caused more than a billion dollars in damage is likely to last into next week, as rain and melted snow flow into Kansas, Missouri and Mississippi, the US National Weather Service said.
Surging waters have damaged hundreds of homes and been blamed for at least three deaths, two in Nebraska and one in Iowa. The flooding has harmed agriculture, inundating tens of thousands of acres, threatening stockpiled grain and killing livestock.
Much of the flooding “stems from the fall flooding in September and October,” Mindy Beerends, a senior meteorologist at the Des Moines office of the National Weather Service, told The New York Times. “The soil was saturated in the fall.”
She said the moisture stayed in the ground all winter while snow accumulated, and when warm air and rain arrived, the snow melted.
“The higher-than-average precipitation, combined with warm temperatures, snowmelt and the frozen ground was a perfect storm for flooding,” she said.
The icy surface made the water spread the way liquid would across a tiled floor, the Times reported.
“The ground was like concrete,” said Kevin Low, a hydrologist at the weather service’s Missouri Basin River Forecast Center, told the Times.
Nebraska Governor Pete Ricketts said put the cost of flood damages at more than $1.3 billion, including $439 million in infrastructure, $85 million in private homes and businesses, $440 million in crops and $400 million in livestock, weather.com reported.
On Wednesday, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz sent National Guard troops and a helicopter to Nebraska to help the emergency response.
In Iowa, farmer Jeff Jorgenson estimated that in Fremont County more than a million bushels of corn and nearly a half-million bushels of soybeans were lost in flooded grain bins. For the 28 farmers in the area, the grain loss was estimated at $7 million.
“The economy in agriculture is not very good right now. It will end some of these folks’ farming, family legacies, family farms,” Jorgenson said. “There will be farmers that will be dealing with so much of a negative they won’t be able to tolerate it.”