Flooded Farmer Still Waiting for Help
The road to Howard Blegen`s farmstead is now closed.
We had hoped to drive through water to show you Blegen`s farm that`s now completely surrounded by water, but the road washed out. It`s back behind the trees
After staying in motels for the past couple of weeks, Blegen purchased another home in nearby Leeds for his wife and two, teenage sons.
He now has two mortgages.
"There isn`t anybody, except local people, that are reaching down to pull you out off the muck. We don`t want new houses built for us or new vehicles or make money off of this. All we want to do is be pulled out of the muck, set on dry ground and we`ll take it from there," said Blegen.
Blegen says he hasn`t received any financial help. So, now at the age of 65 he`s starting over. Now, he joins a long list of neighbors who have also had to rebuild their lives.
Blegen said: "They didn`t do anything for Howard Blegen or my brother, Bob, the Tollefsens that lived down here, Milt Moens, Helgesets, the Howard Dressens."
"There`s nobody out here," he added.
Blegen says this is the advice he received from FEMA: "I asked them directly if that was what they were telling me was to set fire to my house and collect the fire insurance and they said yes, It was. There`s, there`s no light at the end of the tunnel fur us folks out here."
Blegen says the government has recently taken some action for private land owners here. It`s raised the property tax rate on farmland that`s now under water.
Blegen wants to remind people that while flood waters recede after a few weeks, the water on Devils Lake has just continued to go up year after year.
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