“We had a ton of water coming in a short amount of time and with limited places to go and lots of times you're looking at water running where people never expected water to run,” said John Culberson.
Culberson is the highway superintendent in Custer County. He says the water was deep and powerful enough to sweep several homes off of their foundations. Five inches of rain fell in Hermosa in only two hours last night, creating a powerful current that tore through the community.
“There's some that just filled up basements, and others, one home all I could see is the roof and it had floated down away. I'm not sure where the house is, it’s probably a jumble of sticks that flowed to a debris field down stream,” Culberson said.
In some areas, the standing water is still several feet deep. In others, it’s started to recede, revealing the mess Mother Nature has left behind for homeowners to handle.
“This is going to be on these people, a lot may be under the assumption that the federal government is going to step in with a FEMA declaration but that's probably not going to be the case,” Culberson said.
Culberson says on top of work that needs to be done to homes, crews also have a lot of work to do clearing debris from flooded culverts and rebuilding streets that were washed out by the powerful storms.
“Every road is open down here now but we have a considerable amount of work and so does the state of South Dakota to make it right again,” he said.
There were no injures reported because of the flooding in Hermosa. But the large amount of damage has many people remembering the massive flooding in Rapid City more than 30 years ago, when 15 inches of rain fell in the Black Hills on June 9, 1972. But that flood was much more-wide spread, and deadly. Two-hundred and thirty-eight people were killed.
