from Wave 3 news in Louisville.

The response has been quick.

Buck the road to recovery will be long.

That's what state lawmakers heard from emergency and transportation officials today during a discussion on last month's deadly flood disaster.

They told lawmakers the heaviest lift financially will be cleaning up the flood debris.

>> This is very much an ongoing disaster.

And you'll see that, you know, takes time to get out to every one of the communities and measure every one of the homes and and businesses and bridges and roads that have been been damaged.

>> We all know that there were not in the business of comparing disasters.

It's worth noting that.

In 2022.

We inspected more than 1000.

Bridges.

155 were us were damaged.

And that rough value and a cost of about 55 million dollars.

Over 1000 roadway damages occurred across 9 counties.

This time.

Of course, we've had impacts and 39 counties at this time.

We're opening up.

The number of disaster recovery centers.

We have teams going door to door through those impacted counties that are listed there.

>> And you can see the kind of the force lay down those those dots.

All county indicate different things that are going on to get the assistance into the individuals that live in those counties.

I think we've had a tremendous impact.

7 days less than 7 days ago.

We set the you know, President Trump signed this declaration into law for us to start activating the individual assistance.

And this morning's update at 11 o'clock.

We had dispersed 5.5 million dollars to individuals in eastern Kentucky.

So I think over the quick response that we established from the time the declaration was signed until we actually were able to get people registered for assistance was just a little over 2 and a half hours.

We had a disaster.

Survivor teams going into the shelters, getting people's information.

So we were very, very quickly to be on the front side leaning forward unprepared.

We have seeing a tremendous support from FEMA during this event during the night that the rain began.

FEMA head.

Had their federal coordinating officer drive in from North Carolina and be here in the state with us by the early hours of Sunday morning up, not seeing any break-in function of the work that we're doing.

FEMA has several 100 employees in the state going out the letter, the declaration declared that that assistance would become available.

And and at this point, I would have no alarm to the fact that it that I don't believe that they'll that those promises will be kept.

And you have to let me add, we've monitored daily now.

>> What federal reimbursement drawdowns the Commonwealth is done that aren't that are not happening.

I think we have a few issues that are important to know and that's the debris and the number of damages that we've seen to public infrastructure with county roads and bridges begin.

>> A severely impacted.

The debris mission is many of your all's judges and mayors radar for sure.

They are all seeing this debris.

Is it starting to come from the homes of mucking out their damaged property starting to pile up along the street and up visited Eastern Kentucky twice since the Savannah.

And it's it's growing every single time we go over there.

And and that estimate we have a team of Corps of Engineers and staff from Kentucky emergency management out doing debris estimates every day and we're trying to to understand just how much debris there is and how big of a mission it's going to be to actually get it all cleaned up and into the proper landfield be a hazard.

It waste or vegetative debris or whatever it may be.

We've allocated the just prior to and during the be the beginning of this this disaster.

21.5 million of that 50 million leaving a little 28.5 million for of the cap available.

We're still as a director and secretary saying we're still assessing the damage, but we feel pretty certain just because of the debris removal exercise itself that we're going to hit that 50 million captain.

So one of the things we ask the General Assembly to consider is to us, in essence, to provide for a more funding than the 50 million so that we can continuously respond to this disaster as we move down the line.

And as director said, the debris removal is going to be a bigger.

The biggest number and it when it was when we did eastern Kentucky flood, for example, in the East, Kentucky flood disaster in 22, we spent 338 million dollars of state general fund dollars on that one.

Now, that was a much larger, more more damaging disaster.

But give you a sense of and that was a record.

Now we recognize that come July one, another 50 million kicks in in in terms of the budget bill.

But we feel pretty good that before we get there, we're you know, we're going to hit that cap.

And so so we ask your indulgence in terms of lifting the cap or appropriating more funds.

Emergency officials also told lawmakers at the height of the disaster there were 355 road closures.