Resident LaDora Murphy attended the Crawford County Commission on Aug. 11 to discuss reopening Keysville Road, which has been closed due to damage caused by the July 10 flooding.

“Just making the road usable in the short term would be beneficial and appreciated by the residents and those who use Keysville Road,” Murphy said. “Having our roads open so the fire, police and ambulances can get to the people in their time of need and in a timely manner is pertinent.”

She also recommended posting signs that the road is closed to through traffic because she has witnessed several people trying to turn around with some difficulty, including one person having to unhook a trailer to get out.

Residents of Keysville Road and delivery vehicles are also having to use alternate routes, which adds approximately 15-20 minutes each way to their trips.

District 1 Associate Commissioner Mark Pfeiffer explained that there are two major issues keeping the road closed: a blown-out railroad berm and an unsupported box culvert.

“The box culvert, the washout that’s underneath it, and this is also the one-tenth of a mile of railroad berm that we are missing currently, which deposited, if I was to estimate, four to six feet of material on top of our road and out to a landowner’s field across from the area,” Pfeiffer said. “Unfortunately, that creek has done a lot of damage in the last two years.”

He added that they could stabilize the box culvert to allow passenger cars through, but is concerned that larger vehicles, like log trucks or semi-trucks, will try to cross it and it will not withstand the weight. Even if there was signage that larger vehicles couldn’t cross due to safety concerns, he said that there would be some who would ignore it.

“If I go through there and I can make the road look as good as we possibly can and open it up all the way to this box culvert, but I can’t let anybody pass it. I can’t, and not in good conscience,” Pfeiffer said

For the past two years, he said all they have been doing is patching the problems after flood events. Anything that has been done has been temporary, and he wants to make long-term repairs. District 1 has only so much money in the budget to fix these problems, and he wants extensive work to be done on these structures throughout the county so they can withstand some of the impact caused by these events.

The timeline for repairing the issues and reopening the road is uncertain. There are other projects before this one that are a higher priority because without repairs, residents hardly have another way to get out, and the county is working with limited funding. Pfeiffer added that the road district crews have been going to the same crossings to fix them almost every time it rains.

“I said we need to go through there and fix these….Once we fix those, we won’t have to go back and do it again,” Pfeiffer said.

He added that $350,000 of District 1’s budget is put toward materials and supplies to fix the roads, and estimates fixing the culvert would take about $30,000. Approximately $40,000 has already been spent on materials since the July 10 flooding occurred. With many other necessary repairs, including on Whilhite Road, Westover Road and Sig Bass Road, the budget is getting stretched.

“We can’t borrow, you know, millions of dollars to fix this stuff. Everybody says, too, ‘Well, you got FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency). FEMA will come in.’ So FEMA in our (2024) flood, there was lots of numbers that floated around out there that, you know, we started out at $2 million worth of damage total. It got brought down to, you know, about $700-and-some-odd-thousand at one point, and then we received a check just a few weeks ago for a little over $300,000 for that repair, and that got split between the two districts,” Pfeiffer said. “I can’t spend money that I don’t have, you know. So, I, FEMA is not a guarantee.”

District 2 Associate Commissioner Jared Boast added that if Pfeiffer tries to do anything with the situation without coordinating with the disaster relief coordinator through FEMA, then it may harm the chance of getting funding for the project, which he has experienced in a similar situation in District 2.

Boast added that they tried to adopt a use tax twice, which would apply the county’s sales tax rate to online purchases outside of Missouri, to help boost the budget. However, a majority of citizens of Crawford County voted against it.

Pfeiffer said that he would have a meeting with the residents of the road to discuss possible solutions to help alleviate the problem.

Resident Jax Jenson mentioned that the dam on his lake was also severely damaged during the July flooding, and asked for anyone with heavy equipment to help put some material back.

“(Department of Natural Resources) engineers estimated a bare minimum $80,000 to repair it, so it doesn’t bust and flood out everybody below me,” Jenson said. “I brought in a massive pump that’s been running nonstop for weeks now. I think I’m up to about 50 million gallons I pumped out of the lake to relieve pressure on it.”

He also asked if anybody had fill (rocks, dirt, concrete chunks) he could have to help build up the backside of the dam.