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Evers compares the damage from the April storms to severe flooding that hit the Milwaukee area last summer, which his office says caused about $27 million in destruction. Damage from those floods last year pales in comparison to destruction from flooding and other storm damage earlier this month that has piled up across multiple Wisconsin counties.

In a statement, Evers’ office said Wisconsin Emergency Management has reviewed local, initial damage assessments conducted in the days since the severe storms. He said the assessments “show the level of damage caused by recent, severe weather is beyond the state’s ability to recover on its own, and is expected to qualify for federal assistance.”

Evers’ office did not give a monetary estimate of the damage on Wednesday, and countywide and local emergency management groups across southern Wisconsin are still trying to gather preliminary reports that lay out the damages.

But Evers, a Democrat, points out that President Donald Trump’s administration and FEMA denied federal assistance for last year’s Milwaukee floods. The governor paints last year’s denial as being politically motivated, and he’s urging FEMA to remove partisanship from any decisions on disaster declarations and local aid.

Evers cited a Politico report from earlier this year that says “blue,” or Democrat-dominated states find it “three times harder” to get disaster funding under the Trump Administration than so called “red,” or Republican-dominated states.

Evers’ office said Politico suggests the Trump administration has rejected disaster aid for Democrat-led states “at the highest rate in the history of FEMA.”

Under a framework of state and federal rules, Wisconsin’s emergency management division must first work with FEMA on a formal, federal preliminary damage assessment with FEMA before Evers’ office could formally request an emergency and aid declaration from FEMA. However, that report would not come after local governments make local emergency damage assessments and submit them to the state.

So far, counties have not yet released full assessments that show a fully-defined geographic footprint of the areas damaged in the April 17 flooding.

Kevin Wernet, Rock County’s emergency management director, said the county continues to take stock of damage to roads and other flooded areas.

The point of the local visits is to help Wernet and his team generate and submit damage totals to Wisconsin Emergency Management to create the statewide preliminary damage report Evers and other officials say is required for FEMA’s consideration.

Wernet said he’s been in touch with at least a dozen of his counterparts in county emergency management over the April 17 flooding. He said his team plans to ready and submit a flood damage inventory to the state by the end of this week.

Wernet says his team’s main challenge — beyond traveling through parts of the county still riddled with road closures to take stock of damages — is that there’s an incomplete picture over the damage the flooding caused to private property, both residential and commercial.

The county is still urging people to report property damage using the state’s 211 hotline, or visiting 211 online.

{div}”And to be effective with that, they (residents) will want to provide as much detail as they can,” Wernet said.{/div}

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{div}”If folks had 18 inches of water in the basement, that’s a detail. If they had things they had to throw away, a mattress in the basement that got wet, whatever, water damage in their basement, those are the kind of indicators we want to gather so that we can add them to our own justification report. It all adds to Rock County’s story.”{/div}

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