Polk County Emergency Manager Jody Beauchane provided an update on the flooding and damage around Polk County caused by the runoff and snowmelt earlier this month. Despite the heavy runoff, including the Burnham Creek overflowing its banks for the first time in Beauchane’s 18 years with the county, he said it was a pretty efficient management operation for the county. “Gave the board an update on the damages we incurred last week with the runoff,” said Beauchane. “We had seven days starting April 5 where we had flooding issues around the clock. Jay Wallace with the Highway Department was pretty efficient running around getting the signs up, marking them on the road closure app. People would call into dispatch, dispatch would relay the info to the Highway Department, they’d go out and mark the spots and mark them on the map.”
Five homes south of Crookston did need to be sandbagged, with one home having the water top the sandbags and flooding the home’s basement. “We had five homes that needed to be sandbagged,” said Beauchane. “Polk County provided the sandbags and Bertils Construction delivered the sand. We had one home where the water went’ over the sandbags at 2:00 a.m. and they had a foot and a half of water in their basement. The Red Cross was working with that family right way in the morning and the Salvation Army came out to those five homes and delivered flood cleanup kits, so everything is working out.”
Now that the majority of flooding has ceased, Beauchane said they will work to collect estimates on the damage throughout the county to submit for state and federal disaster relief. “This week we’re dealing with damage assessments, gathering all the information we can from the City of Crookston, East Grand Forks, the townships and county,” said Beauchane. “We need to gather all that information and get rough estimates on the damages then we submit that to the state. The state will turn around and look at it and we have a good chance that will be declared as a state disaster. We only have to hit $58,000 to qualify with the state. If we hit $118,000 that qualifies us for a federal (FEMA) declaration. It’s not 100 percent that we will get that but we qualify to be declared.”
Polk County Sheriff Jim Tadman said the online map that was updated by the Highway Department whenever they closed a road was helpful for emergency responders and dispatch. The map allowed dispatch to navigate responders around closed roads more efficiently than in the past when they only had a list of road closures. “I think the biggest thing that helped out this year with our CAD service in dispatch is that the Highway Department had that road closure map,” said Tadman. “With that being utilized with dispatch they were able to go on there and see where the roads were at versus in the past where it was just written down and they’d have to try to figure out where to send the deputies, first responders and/or ambulance services. It went really smooth this year. We had a couple of instances with vehicles going into the waters. A couple of people lost control and went in the waters, some decided that they thought they could make it by going around barricades. I’m happy that we’re having the sunshine and the snow is gone and look forward to a great, safe summer.”
