Mayor: Cost of flood damages to exceed $1 billion

Mayor Karl Dean said Wednesday the cost of damages from the weekend of record flooding will likely exceed $1 billion. 

“It’s safe to say the damage we are looking at will easily exceed a billion dollars,” Dean said Wednesday.

The hardest-hit neighborhoods include parts of Bordeaux, Bellevue and Antioch. The downtown commercial district, among several other areas of town, has also sustained significant damage.

“I know from talking to the folks from the planning and codes departments — people working on the assessments — it just gives me some sense of the way things are going,” Dean said of the figure.

“A billion is a number,” Dean added. “It could be a lot more than that. It will easily be in the billion-dollar range.”

As far as the clean-up effort, Dean said he’s working with Metro Public Works to secure contracts with companies that will complement the work of the department.