Nebraska communities still recovering from 2019 floods

As Dave Pease drives through the north end of Peru, he points out where floodwaters invaded the city in March 2019.

“Those are dead cottonwood trees now,” he said, pointing to a grove to the right. “They were underwater for the whole summer.”

Pease was on the City Council when the floods came and later served as mayor. He said he’ll never forget the day the flooding started.

“The smell was horrible, and it just came up quick,” Pease said. “I mean, we went from being a little bit wet down at the bottom to four or five feet of water, and just came up with a matter of an hour or so. And it flooded in the north end of town.”

About a dozen houses were deemed unlivable. The town’s water treatment plant was unusable. Pease said Peru had about three days’ worth of water and ended up needing to truck in more from nearby towns.

Peru — like many other Nebraska communities — has spent the last six years picking up the pieces from the flood.

Following the 2019 flooding, 84 of the 93 Nebraska counties declared emergencies. David Pearson, service hydrologist for the National Weather Service Forecast Office in Omaha/Valley, said the flood set record river levels. A mixture of snow and cold air followed by rain falling on frozen ground led to widespread flooding across the state.

“What we found out in this flood was that people that might be used to flooding because they're near a river, this flood went beyond that and reached people that maybe never had that problem before,” Pearson said. “It was definitely a out of the ordinary flood and disaster for that reason, too.”

Brent Curtis, preparedness and operations section manager at the Nebraska Emergency Management Agency, said the 2019 floods stretched every resource the state had.

“It was just an escalating and evolving string of calamities happening all at once, everywhere,” Curtis said.

Immediately after the disaster, efforts were focused on needs like clothing, food and shelter. Curtis said the long-term projects came later — like fixing roads and bridges, and even looking to move families and communities out of flood range.

“There's no real switch,” Curtis said. “There is more of a blurry transition as soon as a disaster starts, and as soon as you see the scope of something like we had in 2019, it was very immediately apparent that there would be a long-term recovery process to this.”

Across the state, more than $675 million in federal funds has gone into recovery from the flood.

About 80% of those funds came from the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Several federal officials, including President Donald Trump and Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, have briefly discussed eliminating FEMA, although no such action has been taken. A March executive order emphasized reviewing disaster response policies.

“The reality is FEMA exists because we have large and catastrophic disaster events, events that by their very definition, exceed local and state capacity to handle,” said Chad Berginnis, executive director for the Association of State Floodplain Managers.

Berginnis said the Trump administration has made several moves impacting disaster recovery and prevention. Under Noem’s direction, FEMA eliminated a disaster prevention grant program called the Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities grant. The agency will also no longer enforce Federal Flood Risk Management Standards that Berginnis said “raised the bar” for projects receiving federal money.

He’s worried what the loss of the program and standards will do to communities.

“We should have an expectation that if taxpayer money is being used to rebuild things, that it doesn't get damaged during the next flood,” Berginnis said.

Under the eliminated BRIC program, Nebraska had obligated $8.9 million for flooding projects, severe storms and tornadoes, among others. Berginnis said for every dollar spent to invest in proactive measures, there’s a $6 to $13 benefit.

“I think that these programs are under a significant threat,” Berginnis said. “I think we need to ask ourselves at the state and local level, are we willing to raise our taxes, raise our costs, to do that ourselves, or do we believe in an emergency management approach, a disaster recovery approach that is a partnership among local, state and federal government?”

Despite the funding uncertainty, Nebraska communities are continuing to start and finish projects to recover from the 2019 floods. Like in Peru, which now has an 11-mile water line that runs from Auburn. The project was finished in 2024, giving the city easy access to water that is safe from any future potential flooding.

“Feb. 12, when they turned that water tap on last year, so many people in Peru were happy to have quality water that they could rely on from now on,” said Mary Williams, Peru city deputy clerk and grant coordinator. “That was a very important day to the city.”

Williams said FEMA officials helped her navigate the grant process, especially with how precise the regulations are for receiving the money.

“They work very well with us,” Williams said. “If we run into a snag or a problem, they're right there — a phone call away or an email away — and they're there to help us the whole step of the way in recovery.”

Pease added that following the floods, FEMA was responding to other disasters like hurricanes, wildfires and the COVID-19 pandemic.

“They still managed to keep the focus on making sure that we got our aid in place,” Pease said.

FEMA provided more than $5 million to help build the new water line.

The city also bought out seven lots and 13 houses that were destroyed by the floods. Those homes have been demolished, and the land where they stood will be turned into a clover field this spring. Williams said they are looking for other ways to utilize the area.

“We have ideas and plans slowly coming out,” Williams said. “We included the town people, what did they want down in that area that would also meet FEMA regulations, and it's a very strict build down in that area. For now, we're just going to leave it as clover and let it grow and be a place for the bees and the butterflies and things like that down in that area right now.”

Officials are now looking to start construction on the roads that were washed away on the north end of the city, and Williams said they hope to add another levee behind the current one because it still has a hole in it.

Current Mayor Katy Novak said the city is looking forward to putting the 2019 floods behind them.

“I think that we lost a lot of people during the flood, college employees and families who, whether they live down there or not, it was challenging, during those years of recovery,” she said. “So hoping to breathe life back, get everybody coming back.”

Peru officials are starting to look forward to expanding the city with projects like a new playground. Novak said she’s excited for Old Man River Days this summer, which celebrates the town’s resiliency from floodwaters in the 1940s.

“I think Peru, best town in Nebraska,” Novak said. “I don't know that I want you to publish that, because then everybody will know. But I 100% mean that.”