Eastern Washington Tallies Damage, Arranges Relief Flood Damage Could Top $120 Million Statewide

With the mud in their living rooms starting to dry, Eastern Washington’s flood-ravaged residents and officials set to putting a dollar figure on the damages and making arrangements for federal relief Monday.

The last of Whitman County’s roads was reopened, but sections of Columbia County are so damaged that officials still are having trouble determining how many homes were deluged on the South Fork of the Touchet River.

“Unfortunately, I’ve been able to get to only one because there are two major mudslides and two broken bridges between me and them,” said county Commissioner Jon McFarland.

In Walla Walla County, “life is returning to normal - with the exception of sections of Mill Creek and Waitsburg,” said Darcey Fugman-Small, county planning director. “They’re going to be dealing with it for a long time to come. There are people in Waitsburg with 4 feet of mud in the house. I don’t know if those houses are even salvageable.”

With 200 of its 500 homes damaged, Waitsburg constituted the bulk of the county’s $23 million damage tab.

Dollar figures for Whitman and Columbia counties still are unavailable. Statewide, the damage could top $120 million, the figure reached in the flooding of November 1990, according to the National Flood Insurance Program.

So far, more than 1,500 people have applied for federal disaster relief. Of those, 62 have called from Whitman County, 51 from Walla Walla County and 38 from Columbia County.

Hundreds of other applications have come from southwestern Washington counties. President Clinton, who made a disaster declaration Friday, is scheduled to visit the region and Portland on Wednesday but is not expected to come to the eastern side of the state.

Disaster relief can include grants for temporary housing and minor repairs, up to $12,900 for disasterrelated needs and unemployment payments for workers who lost their jobs because of the disaster. Low-interest loans also are available for people with private or business property losses.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency aims to have building inspectors looking at damage within five days and checks in the hands of victims seven to 10 days later, said Phil Cogan, a FEMA spokesman. Victims have 60 days to apply and need not worry about the money running out, he said.

While the agency is taking the bulk of its applications by phone, FEMA is scheduled to open a disaster relief assistance center in Walla Walla on Wednesday, with other centers in the area to follow. Victims can call the agency at (800) 462-9029.

Columbia County’s McFarland said it is critical that money come soon for repairs to the dikes in downtown Dayton, the county seat, and the city’s aging sewage treatment plant, which was knocked out by flooding.

Whitman County Treasurer Mary Crawford, who is taking damage claims to report to FEMA, said she has fielded complaints of wet carpeting, raw sewage in houses, dead livestock and lost hay. A caller from Palouse, the hardest-hit town, said he had filled two large Dumpsters with ruined belongings from his home’s first floor.

“Their appliances, their furniture, anything that happened to be in there was gone, destroyed,” she said. “It’s running the gamut from nuisance damage to major damage.”

While homeowners were measuring the dirt inside their homes, farmers were gauging the amount of soil lost from their fields.

Jon Jones, manager of the Whitman Conservation District, said the rain and melting snow created the worst erosion in the Palouse in 10 years.

Much of the brown color in flooding streams actually came from eroded riverbanks, he said, but some fields in the eastern part of the Palouse lost up to 80 tons of soil per acre at a value of $50 to $200 a ton.

“What it really comes down to is it’s invaluable, it’s irreplaceable,” Jones said. “Once it’s gone, it doesn’t come back.”

, DataTimes