City of Hawesville Awarded Grant; Storm Water Pump Station Renovation

The Hazard Mitigation Grant Program has awarded $788,751 to the City of Hawesville to update and renovate the city’s storm water pump station. This upgrade is very necessary, as the station helps prevent flooding by collecting storm water from the city and pumping it over the levee when river elevation requires the sluice gates to close.

The storm water pump station in Hawesville was originally built in 1952. This grant money was much needed and will be used to replace three motors and pumps, as well as an upgrade on the system’s electrical, mechanical and control system.

The Hazard Mitigation Grant Program provides grants to state and local governments to implement long-term hazard mitigation measures with funding from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). The City of Hawesville applied for funds with assistance from the Green River Area Development District (GRADD). The city will match the grant award with $41,015 – which is 12.5 percent of the total grant. As city employees work on this project, that can be used toward matching the grant money.The grant was applied for 5 years ago and has been declined every year until this year. “I’m very elated to have obtained this grant,” Hawesville City Mayor Rob McCormick said. “We’ve been working on it for 5 years and since we’re showing progress in some audits and things, they’ve awarded us the grant through FEMA.

This grant is really going to increase the safety of downtown Hawesville and the surrounding downtown area. It’s going to help the home owners because some of their basements down on Water Street – if our emergency pumps don’t kick in and run, they end up with flooded basements and we want to prevent that from happening, and any damage to any homes.

The pumps that are currently in there were put in in 1951, so it’s time. The hard rains we had last week really put a struggle on our support system. We did have some properties downtown that had some flooding in their basements but I called them and reassured them that we’re working on this grant to get them new pumps and, hopefully, this will be a thing of the past once we get this done.

I’m just very happy for this grant to come available for us and for the citizens of Hawesville. These things with FEMA take a little bit of time. Right now, we’re looking to get an engineering firm to head this. We reached out to engineering firms last week and they have the opportunity to bid this and they will be.”

McCormick said there are additional monies through GRADD and FEMA that can be obtained as well, because they will have to re-bid a lot of this project. “The money is there,” he said, “we just have to ask for it. It is an extra large chunk of money that GRADD has and they see no reason that we won’t be able to apply to get that added to this once we get all our bids in.”