State of emergency extended to Chesterfield Township, New Baltimore
(CBS DETROIT) - Gov. Gretchen Whitmer adds Chesterfield Township and New Baltimore to the state of emergency list in Michigan following storm damage across all parts of the state.
"You leave for so long, and even just for a few hours, and your house, you almost forget that this is what happened to it," says Jessica Blandino.
We first caught up with Blandino in August, just days after the flooding. She called the basement home.
Fast forward to the second week of September, and it's gutted, a shell of what it used to be.
"We need to keep rebuilding and going through everything because we still have an entire process upstairs of just sorting and going through, and we're still every day, I'm coming home, and we're throwing more stuff out," says Blandino.
Now that Whitmer's office has declared a state of emergency, Blandino is hoping for aid in repairing the damages.
New Baltimore Mayor Thomas Semaan says FEMA will have boots on the ground in Chesterfield Township and New Baltimore communities taking a look at impacted homes, like the Blandino's, within a week.
"They will verify information of the data that we've collected with a sampling of residents, and then that data will go to Washington DC, and hopefully the president's office will deem it necessary to bring whatever federal funds or relief that our residents can seek for losses," says Semaan.
"I would imagine within the next seven to 10 days we're going to have a plan moving forward as to how we're going to approach this and work towards getting the residents some resolution to recoup some of that cost whatever mechanism that may look like," says Chesterfield Township Supervisor Brad Kersten.