‘We need the feds to get involved.’ WCEMA’s John Elfer talks about flood recovery

During Tuesday’s Warren County Board of Supervisor meeting, John Elfer, director of the Warren County Emergency Management Agency, told supervisors that Warren County is eligible for an unspecified amount of federal funds.

About two weeks ago, the county was included in the federal disaster declaration for last February’s storms and flooding, along with Issaquena, Sharkey and Yazoo counties. Warren County was also included in the April tornado declaration.

“That will allow public assistance,” Elfer said of both declarations. “That’s infrastructure damage, debris removal and protective measures from, like, the Sheriff’s Office, the road department and emergency management, any activities that we did leading up to and managing the storms. “

“That’s not for private property owners,” Elfer emphasized.

Asked whether individual assistance (IA) from federal sources is expected, Elfer said the county’s requests were denied for both events, and an appeal denied for the April tornado event. “We have appealed it on the flooding,” he said of the February event, indicating he should know more later this week.

Elfer said his agency hasn’t been waiting on the federal government to help people affected.

“We’re trying to use other resources, like the United Way [and] volunteers to try to help individuals whose primary residence has been affected, and that’s kind of where we’re at on that,” he said.

Whether county residents will get any assistance from the Federal Emergency Management Agency is based on numerous factors, including the amount of funds available for distribution and whether damaged homes are primary residences.

“Warren County got hit harder on the flood, on the backwater flood, than any other county, and that’s just because we had more people” Elfer said. “But, unfortunately—or fortunately, however you want to look at it—a lot of the resident’s property that was damaged was not their primary home. It was a lake house, or a second or third home.”

The Great Backwater Flood was highly unusual, though, because of the length of time land was under water.

“I’ve never seen—and I don’t think anybody in the state has ever seen—a disaster handled like this with FEMA, because the disaster lasted so long. Nobody’s ever seen a six-month flood before,” Elfer said, adding, “I’ve never seen anything quite like it, to be honest with you.”

Elfer offered praise for the efforts of the state’s two U.S. senators, Roger Wicker and Cindy Hyde-Smith. “They’ve been big allies of ours, talking about the pumps,” he said.

The director was also effusive in his praise for the State of Mississippi. “I’ve testified before the state committee hearings, talking about the issues that we have,“ Elfer said.

“The state’s been wonderful. The state has provided temporary housing assistance—they started that back in February or March—to assist people that were displaced. The state, specifically [the Mississippi Emergency Management Agency] and Gregory Michel, the director of MEMA, they’ve been wonderful.

“We’ve gotten everything we’ve asked for from the State of Mississippi. The governor made sure of that, and he’s been over here since day one. And the lieutenant governor; he’s been over here as well.

The state, though, simply doesn’t have the resources needed to make residents whole and resolve the backwater flooding issue.

“It’s not enough,” Elfer said of the assistance from the state. “We need the feds to get involved in this now.”

In addition to getting individual assistance, getting the pumps completed at the Steele Bayou are critical in preventing another disaster like the one the area experienced this year. The Environmental Protection Agency vetoed the pumps in 2008. They would have been the final piece of a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers flood-relief plan for the backwater, in process for decades. The combination of events this year made what the USACE completed worse than nothing at all. The series of channels and levees, in combination with unprecedented amounts of rainfall and snow melt, turned the South Delta into a big toxic soup bowl of flood water.

“I’m all about mitigation. I get it: raising houses, raising roadways, taking people out of floodplains. But part of that mitigation needs to be the pumps,” Elfer said.

If the pumps had been installed and working, “I don’t think we’d have had one house flooded,” he said.

The pumps would not have solved all the flooding that occurred this year, just the majority of it. Elfer indicated that 200,000 acres would have flooded before the pumps would have been turned on. Regardless, this year’s disastrous flooding put about 550,000 acres under water, meaning some 350,000 acres would have been flood free had the pumps been operational.

“I mean, no good came of this thing,” he said. “It was not good for the environment. It was not good for the people. It was a terrible, terribly destructive flood. And contrary to popular belief, we’re not going to kill all the wildlife by turning the pumps on, and we’re not going to flood down range. New Orleans, Baton Rouge and all that, that’s not going to see an adverse effect based on everything I’ve read about it.”

Recovery is underway for folks in the Yazoo backwater, but right now, there’s a range of where people are in the process.

“It’s got different levels to it,” Elfer said. “Some people have returned home, and their lives are somewhat back to normal. I think some people are still displaced, and some people are still picking up the pieces.”

Much of the flood waters and what they’re leaving behind are dangerously polluted. “Oh yeah,” he said. “There’s all kinds of stuff floating around.”

The Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality has been taking soil samples, but Elfer hasn’t seen those results, yet. On Sept. 14, the agency will be on Eagle Lake for a hazardous waste day. In addition, the state and local road departments have been picking up some debris, but, “there’s just so much to do,” Elfer said.

“This could be years before we totally recover from it.”