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Kingston,Mi | In 1986 we had a 17 inch rainfall over a 2 day period of time which for my area was a 500 year event (actually a 1 in 500 chance of occurring for any single event). As the water headed out of the uplands to the flat land s near Saginaw Bay, it created a lot of different problems. All the state and federal agencies were put on notice and deployed their programs and employee's. ASCS took the applications for various types of immediate disaster assistance that they could offer assistance for which were (4) specific items; (1) removing debris from cropland that would prevent farming operations, (2) repair of damaged water and erosion control structures that met design criteria, (3) replacing livestock fencing if there were livestock present on at least one side of the fence but not fencing around horse pens or livestock feed yards and the 4 item I don't remember (possibly rehabbing stock ponds). The effected area was around 1/4 of our county or about 200 square miles and ASCS received about 900 requests for assistance for these items. At the same time SCS was tasked with exigency work to protect safety and welfare (in our case, shoring up failed ditch banks adjacent to roads). The exigency phase can last no longer than 30 days then it becomes a different class of emergency.
The district conservationist and myself investigated the sites with failed ditch banks ( a lot were 1 to 1 side slopes the failed to vertical right to the edge of the road way), We did not address the failures on the farm side of the ditch because seldom does a school bus, mail carrier or ambulance travel over in the field and so it isn't a high priority health and safety concern). Because we didn't work that side, the drain commissioner tried day after day to get FEMA to work there, same answer different agency. We would be supervising a repair site and the drain commissioner and the FEMA person would pull in the field entrance after looking at the field from the road then look at the site from the field and the answer was the same for nearly a week "not a FEMA correctable problem" and then they would move on to another site for the same answer.
Each agency has defined activities per regulation and has to work within them.
When I volunteered to work in Missouri a year after the flood, we were repairing dikes that were Corp of Engineer designed and built, no repairs for additional dikes that didn't meet specifications along with removing debris and repairing other drainage. We went out to a site west of Fayette, possibly west of Brunswick, to meet with a drain commissioner on repairing a drainage ditch. We could not do anything but restore it to it's pre-flood event state. We looked over the site prior to the drain commissioner getting there and decided that it was likely not in the drainage districts best interest to restore it to the pre-flood state as it would take several cubic yards of earth fill per 10 ft. section and finding 10 inch Black Walnut to plant in the ditch bottom. When we explained the program and its limitations, he laughed and said it was worth a try, but no they didn't want the ditch filled in or tress planted in the bottom. | |
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FEMA -----Why no help for the grass fires ??
