No firm figure on property damage
Numbers and costs vary depending on the agencies doing the assessing and the total counties assessed.
Despite tens of millions of dollars in taxpayer money flowing across Colorado for flood relief, a solid accounting of total damage wreaked on homes and businesses remains elusive.
A month after the historic floods, numbers and costs vary widely depending on which counties are included and which local, state or federal agency is doing the counting.
The work to get a credible damage estimate comes as the state asks for huge amounts of federal assistance based on those needs.
“We just did flyovers. We didn’t do door-to-door assessment for this disaster,” said Micki Trost, a spokeswoman for the Colorado Office of Emergency Management. “What we have is approximate numbers, because we wanted to get the process started and get the money into the program so people can apply.”
The state doesn’t maintain a
county-by-county tally of the private-sector losses in either the 24 counties included in the state emergency declaration or statewide. The numbers that have been released are difficult to untangle.
Trost suggested The Denver Post call each of the 24 counties, but calls to eight of the counties yielded no numbers, and emergency officials in only two counties, Boulder and Larimer, returned calls requesting the information.
In a news release last week, Gov. John Hickenlooper cited figures that his office later could not explain, referring questions about inconsistencies to the Office of Emergency Management. The agency took several days and a series of phone calls to parse the governor’s numbers.
In the release, Hickenlooper said, “Damage to property has been widespread and extensive: 1,882 homes have been destroyed, and (Federal Emergency Management Agency) estimates that over 26,000 households are directly affected by the flooding.”
Trost said the reference to 26,000 homesis an estimate for the entire state, not the 24 counties in the state declaration. The estimate was based on preliminary FEMA estimates.
But FEMA is assessing only the nine counties named in the presidential disaster declaration, agency spokesman Tom Schafer said. He said those numbers shouldn’t be used to estimate statewide numbers.
Asof thisweek, FEMA’s 190 inspectors had looked at about 21,000 properties in the nine hardest-hit counties, according tothe agency.
Trost stressed that although estimates and projections are used to guide relief money, no relief dollars are awarded until each property is inspected to make sure losses qualify. Disasters take time to appraise, she said. “With some of our wildfires, it’s been 12 to 18 months before we knewthe final numbers,” she said.
Mike Steele, spokesman for the Louisiana Governor’s Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness, said even in a state accustomed to flood losses, it’s not easy to corral the numbers.
“It takes a lot more time than most people would initially think,” he said. “After Katrina, wewere still finding damage a year or year and a half after the storm.”
Besides money for Colorado victims’ homes and businesses, the state has somewhere between $300 million and $500million in washed-out roads and bridges, the governor and state highway department have said.
The deal in the U.S. House and Senate to end the partial federal government shut- down would include lifting a $100 million cap on transportation aid for Colorado.
Private insurance companies are no further along in calculating Colorado’s flood losses, but they aren’t expecting a big tab, said Carole Walker, executive director of the Rocky Mountain Insurance Information Association.
Few, if any, victims will have private flood insurance, but there could be losses for things such as sewer backups and damage that could be covered by homeowners’ policies.
“Those numbers aren’t high enough that we’re able to track them at this point,” Walker said.
Flood victims have until Nov. 14 to request FEMA assistance.
The state emergency office says on its website that $60.7 million in state and federal aid and low-interest loans has been handed out, including $41.3million to individuals in the nine federally recognized counties. The state has set aside $91.5 million in a state fund to cover losses in the 24 counties Hickenlooper designated as disaster areas.
Local, state and federal spokespeople said that, in many cases, it’s difficult for inspectors to determinewhat property is salvageable and what is beyond repair. The homeowner, insurer or taxpayer stands to be on the hook for a lot of money based on such decisions, which will be closely scrutinized, Trost said.
In hard-hit Boulder County, inspectors still can’t reach some homes that are cut off by the floods, said county spokeswoman Barb Halpin.
“It’s easy to figure out when a home is completely destroyed,” she said, “but it gets a lot harder when it’s 50-50.”