As McLean County residents continue home repairs after last month’s powerful storms and tornadoes, they are doing so without any federal assistance.
Cathy Beck, director of the McLean County Emergency Management Agency [EMA], said the Small Business Administration [SBA] determined not enough homes in the county met the threshold to provide low-interest home repair loans.
“We follow the FEMA guidelines on creating the damage categories, which enabled IEMA to bring in SBA or request SBA to come and do an assessment and see if we can get support,” Beck said on WGLT’s Sound Ideas.
The National Weather Service [NWS] confirmed six tornadoes blew through the county on April 17.
To offer the loans, SBA said the county needed 25 homes to require damage repairs equal to at least 40% of the home’s value. The agency determined only 16 met their requirements, according to Beck.
“So, if a home is a $150,000 value, then the damages would need to be $60,000,” said Beck. “So, we were far short of what we needed to be able to bring in ... for the low-interest loans.”
Beck said the difficulty comes from higher value homes having costly repairs that make it harder to hit the threshold.
“So that dollar to fix it is higher,” she said. “If it had been a $80,000 home, a roof would have taken that as major [fix] because it’s going to be $20,000 to replace a roof,” she said, adding “…which makes sense, but the cost to do the repairs, a little bit of siding here and there, some roof shingles, half a roof. Those aren’t going to be at that 40% when it’s a high value home.”
Even though SBA will not come through with loans, homes still need to be repaired. But there are other options.
“It’s going to be rough. Hopefully, they have insurance and that’s going to cover most or all of it,” Beck said. “There are some not-for-profits that will help with unmet needs. Typically, that’s not going to be a home repair…”
Beck said her agency also has connected residents with Red Cross and nearby churches for additional assistance.
Assessing damage
EMA teams did not go out to assess damage until Sunday, April 19. Before that, they had only seen drone video, “…although the rural coordinators were out and looking at damage and sending us information on Saturday,” Beck said.
“That Saturday, we were working with administration from county and town and city on disaster declaration and then Sunday, we were planning what areas and how we were going to go doing the damage assessment on Monday.”
Residents could self-report damage beforehand with a portal set up by EMA that helped determine the order of assessment by them and other agencies, including the Federal Emergency Management Agency [FEMA] and the NWS.
“The categories are determined by FEMA,” said Beck. “So, people put in what their damage is and then we go in and look at the reports and put the correct category and based on what those FEMA guidelines are.”
Beck said about half of residents with damaged homes self-reported.
“When we went back out with [SBA] this week, we found a bunch of properties that we didn’t have before, so those reports weren’t in,” she said.
Countywide coordination
Beck said EMA determined last month’s storms to be equal to a full-scale exercise as coordination between the county, Town of Normal and City of Bloomington was equal to an even larger event than what occured.
That helps as, on top of events like a subsequent emergency declaration, ongoing collaboration is a necessity to track costs of weather events.
“…We need to have those numbers to be able to show that, yes, we need a state and a [Federal Emergency Management Agency] declaration to be able to bring in assistance. But the threshold for getting that is really high,” said Beck. “That’s really important why they track that data, personnel over time, equipment, volunteer hours even helps.”
Beck said all the figures added up are what help demonstrate the need for assistance.
Coordination also depends on residents, Beck said. Bloomington-Normal had gone 20 years without a tornado, but there's no guarantee it will go another 20.
“Unfortunately, there’s not really a bubble,” she said. “We’ve just been very, very lucky and even this event, while there was a lot of damage, no one was injured, no one lost their life…there’s going to be a day when we get hit like Washington[, Illinois] and being prepared and taking heed on the warnings and the alerts and doing what you’re supposed to do to keep yourself and your family safe, it’s really important.”
EMA preparation
On the day of the storms, Beck said EMA was gearing for what was already expected to be severe weather.
“Our entire weather response team was available, and we were all working as a team,” she said. “There were conference calls with [NWS] briefings, and so we share that information out with rural coordinators, the main spotters there.”
Beck said her team could tell by the middle of the day on April 17 the weather was going to take a bad turn.
“We had a team of five EMA people working on our side, and then we have 26 coordinators across the county that we work with that have one of our radios, so we can directly work with them, and then they each have a team,” she said.
Around 200 people are monitoring the weather in McLean County during such extreme events, said Beck. Otherwise, there’s 24/7 supervision of some kind.
Beck said the team’s response is the same, regardless of a storm appearing at 8 a.m. or 11 p.m. She said an advantage of night storms is that most people already are in their homes and can take cover.
