News Talk 94.1/AM 1600 Where The Upper Cumberland Talks
Putnam County officials expect to submit the final report on the March 3rd tornado to FEMA next week.
Mayor Randy Porter said the report includes expenses of overtime hours and law enforcement work around $3 million. The Clean-up will cost around $2 million.
“We have weekly conference calls with FEMA, and they’ve been very good to help us,” Porter said. “It’s very time consuming, but it’s a lot of money for our county and we want to be able to recoup as much of it as we can, so we’re doing the very best job we can.”
Porter said officials have been collecting data since the March tornado. He said FEMA will pay 75 percent while the county and state will split the remaining 25 percent evenly. Volunteer hours, donations, and equipment used are given a dollar amount according to FEMA guidelines. Porter said the dollar values will be compared to whatever the 12.5 percent match will be.
“We had a huge turnout when it came to volunteers for weeks after the tornado had been cleaned up,” Porter said. “We think we should get really close to covering our 12.5 percent with those volunteer hours, and donations of equipment and so forth.”
Porter said he hopes the county will begin seeing FEMA payments in the next year. He said after the 2015 ice storm it took about three years for FEMA to finish sending the promised funds. Porter said he hopes the lessons learned in that disaster helped the county better account for all the expenses.
