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The Flood With Love initiative from the Portage Health Foundation is winding down after expending nearly $2 million in flood relief following last year’s flood over Father’s Day weekend.
Executive Director Kevin Store said out of nearly 500 applications for help, they are down to only nine projects that carried over into the current year and those are expected to be completed in the first quarter.
The foundation was able to help many homeowners restore their homes both inside and out. Store said, “Our concern was the breached drain fields, septic fields, and some of the health risks that were presented by all that and we’ve done a lot to try and get some of those homeowners in those neighborhoods as cleaned up as best as we can and to minimize any future risk to the homeowner on private property as we possibly could.”
An estimated $900,000 came pouring in from individual and corporate donors to go along with over $1 million from the foundation to meet the needs of the victims. Any additional contributions to the relief effort will go toward offsetting the dollars that were expending by the foundation.
The Portage Health Foundation will begin to turn their attention to the extensive damage done to the local trail system and working with the Michigan Department of Natural Resources. “They did a lot of work this past summer for stabilization, but the next step for us in terms of our flood relief is going to be to position the foundation to leverage support to get those corridors back in use as best as possible.”
Any donations sent to the PHF for the trails must be designated as such. As with the other donations made towards homeowner flood relief, all monies received by the PHF for trails will be 100% applied towards the restoration of those trails systems damaged by the 2018 Father’s Day Flood and included on the MDNR damage report.
All activity done for the #FloodwithLove initiative has been done with the support of the Attorney General’s office and the local emergency response team. The PHF will be providing a more detailed and audited financial update to the community once it has been completed. They anticipate that to be ready by April 2019.
