MANKATO — The majority of the counties in the south-central region have declared a state of emergency and/or have requested a presidential declaration of a major disaster as flooding continues.
The status is crucial to receive federal reimbursement for cleanup efforts.
The Blue Earth and Nicollet county boards both have passed resolutions requesting the presidential declaration.
The city of Mankato is also under emergency status.
Other counties that have confirmed to The Free Press they are under a similar status include Le Sueur, Watonwan, Brown, Sibley and Martin.
Eric Weller, Blue Earth County emergency management director, said the effort to calculate damage costs is ongoing but that it’s expected to be in the millions.
“We are still receiving information on damages from our cities and townships. For some of them, it’s hard to estimate until the water goes down. Until the water goes down, we won’t see all of those,” he said.
“We’ve already received from the city of Mankato a preliminary damage assessment in the neighborhood of about just under $5 million. Typically these are estimates and usually they go up.”
This comes as Gov. Tim Walz and other state and federal officials took an aerial tour of the southern Minnesota region Tuesday before doing a press conference.
“The human impact was, certainly in Waterville, many more homes (impacted). The impact certainly feels pretty dramatic … I would estimate dozens and dozens of homes and certainly a lot of wet basements,” Walz said.
“I think the thing that struck me, and I’ll let others speak for themselves, was just the number of fields and what looked like crop damage.”
More than 40 National Guard soldiers are deployed to Waterville.
U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar said it’s now the federal government’s job to step in and help.
“I am not an engineer, but looking at that dam (in Rapidan) and seeing the severe damage there as well as washed-out roads in Minnesota, I believe we could well be into our $10.5 million. That is the level in which federal aid would tick in for public infrastructure,” she said.
“When that’s triggered … then 75% of that public infrastructure is paid for by the federal government on a county-by-county basis.”
Minnesota Department of Agriculture Commissioner Thom Peterson said it’s important for farmers to report any issues or damage to their county office.
“Whether that is crop loss, whether that’s water in fields. Whether that’s damage to their livestock facility. We need them to go into their local county office and report that. That helps us determine the loss threshold and that will, in turn, help unlock those federal and state programs that are so important to farmers,” he said.