Giving Compass' Take:

• Brett Adams describes the state of the town of Peru, Nebraska, as it prepares for the next flood season and how it is still recovering from 2019. 

• What are donors doing for disaster relief efforts against flooding? 

• Learn more about the midwest flooding in 2019 and how to help. 

Brett Adams, who farms near the town of Peru in southeast Nebraska, takes the good news where he can get it these days. After nearly a year, the floodwater is mostly gone from his riverside farmland.

Adams is on the local levee board, which manages the town’s nearly 8 miles of Missouri riverbed. And the (unpaid) work keeps him very busy: he was on a call when I first climbed into his pickup, apologetically holding a finger up every so often.

We drove past the soaked and stubbly remains of 2018’s crop, and tools—once assumed lost—caked in the mud. After a few minutes, we reached the blown out levee that once kept the Missouri River away from his parents' house.

But Peru is far from out of the woods. Adams said repairs haven’t been made yet to the town’s levee system, which puts him and neighboring farmers at risk to flood again this year.

“We have a very small level of protection. You get above flood stage or something...the water is going to come running right back in here,” he said.

So Adams spends his days mostly trying to answer one question: where will a handful of farmers get tens of millions of dollars to fix Peru's levees?

Matt Krajewski, the Readiness Branch Chief at the Omaha District Army Corps of Engineers, said in a normal situation, the path forward might be clearer.

“If it's a federally constructed levee, then the federal government pays 100% of the rehabilitation costs,” Krajewski said.

That is, as long as it’s active in the Army Corps of Engineers’ Levee Rehabilitation program.

The Corps, which built most of the Midwest’s levees, runs the program under the Flood Control Act of 1944. Each year, the agency inspects the levee and lists whatever repairs it may need.

But if a levee board doesn’t finish upgrades in enough time, or the levee isn’t kept up to code, the Corps can mark it “inactive”.

Read the full article about new flood season by Christina Stella at Harvest Public Media.