LAFAYETTE, Ind. (AP) - The thought of leaving her flooded-out home on Barton Beach Road brings Carla Johnson to the point of tears, but she’s ready to go if the government will make a buyout offer - almost any reasonable offer.
“At this point, I’m pretty devastated. My world’s been flipped upside down,” she said as she described her no-win choices: leaving, or staying in the house, repairing it after the Feb. 21 floods and risking the same fate next time the Wildcat Creek floods.
The two-story house where she’s lived for 29 years is filled with memories of 28 Christmases, summer evenings listening the water flow north to the Wabash, the sounds of fish jumping, flocks of geese honking in the spring. It’s not easy for Johnson to consider letting it all go.
She was offered a buyout by the Federal Emergency Management Agency after the 2003 flood, but she said FEMA offered only 40 percent of what her house is worth. They - she and her husband, along with her mother, who lived next door - turned down the offer.
“As bad as we hate to say, yeah,” she said when asked if she was willing to leave. “We love it out here. It’s so beautiful out here when it’s not flooded. Nature. Natural life.”
An offer from FEMA looks like a long shot at this point.
“At this time there are no FEMA funds, directly from FEMA or through the state, for any buyout activities,” Laurie Wilson, Tippecanoe County grant administrator, told the Journal & Courier (https://on.jconline.com/1gccJo4 ). “There’s always a possibility.”
After the 2003 flood, Johnson, her mother and her neighbor could have been eligible for a buyout that would have offered 100 percent of the appraised value of their homes. FEMA would have paid its standard 75 percent, and a grant from Indiana Housing and Community Development Authority would have filled in the remaining 25 percent. Additionally, the county would have picked up the costs for closing, attorney fees, professional fees, demolition and restoration of the land.
But the Johnsons turned down the offer in December 2009, believing the buyout talk was still for just 40 percent of their home’s value.
“The chances of funds being immediately available are not promising,” Wilson said. “But we are putting together a full application package to submit to Indiana Department of Homeland Security for them, to FEMA, on our behalf.
“Basically, if you don’t ask, you don’t get.”
The package the county is assembling will be filed with the Indiana Department of Homeland Security as a proposed mitigation project plan, designed to remove the risk of loss of life by removing those living along the creek, razing their homes and restoring the area to its natural environment, Wilson said.
It would eliminate the need for first responders to go into harm’s way to rescue residents during floods, as they did Feb. 21 when an ice jam on the Wildcat Creek caused a flash flood that consumed the dry earth in less than 20 minutes.
Wilson said a neighborhood meeting is planned for 5 p.m. March 13 to discuss the proposed mitigation project and what forms neighbors need to retrieve to speed the process along. Perhaps in two or three months, the county can have a proposal to Indiana Department of Homeland Security, and then a few months after that, state officials will decide whether to forward the request to FEMA.
Since the Feb. 21 flooding doesn’t fit into the category of a disaster declaration, the only way the county might entice federal intervention is to perform a project that will ensure that there will never be another resident flooded out in that area of the Wildcat Creek.
FEMA funding for such a project would require everyone living along Barton Beach Road to agree to a buyout.
Johnson is ready to move rather than face another flood, but her neighbor, Kile Minniear, who lives at the bend in the road between Barton Beach Road and Barton Beach Lane, isn’t jumping on any FEMA offer - if it ever comes.
“The whole thing kind of hinges on me,” he said.
Minniear’s house used to flood every time the creek jumped its banks. Then he raised his house and hauled in thousands of tons of fill dirt. Now his house is above the flood fringe. His house didn’t even flood on Feb. 21, but he admits it was close.
In today’s buyouts, FEMA generally offers 75 percent of a house’s appraised value, Wilson said. That’s not good enough for Minniear.
“If they was to pay 75 percent of … I’d still be walking away with a $70,000 hole,” he said. “It would take some fair market value to me to go along with this deal. This 75 percent … isn’t going to cut it.
“Don’t get me wrong. I sympathize with every one of my neighbors. A lot of them lost everything they got out here. I want to go along, but I just can’t take a beating.”
Wilson said, “If we can do a package where everybody on the entire street is interested in a buyout and eligible for a buyout, then we can present a mitigation plan to the state and to FEMA that will take care of the problem in that area once and for all, rather than doing it a house here and a house there. That might be more attractive to them. That’s what I’m hoping.”
Larry Aukerman, Tippecanoe County Area Plan Commission planner and flood plain manager, has talked with some Barton Beach Road residents. They’ve been agreeable to a buyout, even at 75 percent of the appraised value, he said.
Wilson said, “We will put together as high of quality application that we can so we can assist the citizens of the county who have experienced loss and help them put their lives back together. We can’t make them whole, but we might be able to help.”
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Information from: Journal and Courier, https://www.jconline.com
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