County engineer: Weekend rains leave little immediate damage

Published 9:53 am Tuesday, December 9, 2014

The rains came late Friday night and stayed throughout most of Saturday. So far the results were slight, but what the future holds is still unknown.

“We closed Hog Run Road for about four or five hours,” Doug Cade, county engineer, said. “And we had some other small-road flooding. It wasn’t significant.”

But it will be days before the county will know if the rains left any greater damage than a few hours of inconvenience for motorists.

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“That usually shows up in about a week or so, by the time the water moves up through the ground,” Cade said. “It takes a while.”

Four years ago debilitating rains left the county with 153 landslides and damaged 148 bridges. That totaled more than $12 million in damages that was covered, for the most part, by federal and state funding, whether through the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Federal Highway Administration or the Natural Resource Conservation Service.

The county, however, hasn’t received all of those funds yet.

“The work is complete but the financial part is not closed,” Cade said.

Federal funds will cover 75 percent of the cost with 12.5 percent coming from the state and the remaining 12.5 percent from the county’s portion of the Motor Vehicle Gas Tax.