(logo clinks) - [Radio Announcer] If you're just getting up, hey, go back to bed, it's terrible.

Simpson Avenue, Sumner Avenue, all of your main roads, standing water.

(water splashes) - We've had a true history of catastrophic flooding.

It's gotta be more than half of our total community is in the flood zone.

If you go back to the 1960s, we've had 17 federally declared disasters from flooding in our community.

When I was a kid growing up in South Aberdeen, I can remember actually being in a rowboat with my dad in the street when there was a major flood.

(tense music) And so while we've always had a lot of annual rain, with climate change, the intensity of the rain is a lot worse and so it makes those flooding events a lot more likely now.

If we don't do anything about it, I mean, it's gonna just get worse in the future.

Just this last January, the water actually overtopped its banks.

It flowed down that way to the police station, out that way to Highway 109.

It flowed that way down 8th Street into Downtown.

So, I mean, this is really one of the focal points of flooding here in Holquiam.

And ironically, it's on Levee Street.

(tense music) I think that, as a city or community, one of the things you should always plan for is to try to avoid building critical facilities in areas that are a high risk of landslides, you know, flooding.

But for us, everything is in the flood zone.

You really got probably three choices, the levees, elevating every home, or relocating the community all to high ground.

And from a feasibility standpoint, you know, the other two options, just, they're not options.

So really, building a levee is really the only solution.

(tense music continues) At this point in time, $94 million of FEMA funds have been announced.

5,100 properties will be protected.

It'll be the biggest infrastructure project that the two communities have ever done.

(tense music continues) So basically right here I'm standing in the exact footprint of where the levee would be, heading this direction and this direction.

We're looking at about maybe a three-foot wall that'd be this high on the backside of the sidewalk here.

We'll no longer be in the flood zone and that will eliminate the burdens of flood insurance, it will eliminate requirements of building to the flood elevation.

That would all go away once the levee is certified.

It's gonna set our citizens up, and our communities, for the next 80 years because we're building the levees to meet 80 year climate projections.

100 years from now, if climate change is worse and you needed to go higher, we're thinking about that as we're designing these.

So they will be there forever.

(tense music)