CARBON COUNTY — Work is underway at Cooney State Park to restore areas damaged by the historic flooding in the summer of 2022.
Three campgrounds (Marshall Cove, Fisherman's Point and Red Lodge Point) are undergoing shoreline restoration projects in an effort to prevent future flooding.
Click here to learn more:
Dennis Merkel with Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks said the project will help keep the area and visitors safe.
"It’s a shoreline restoration project in three separate areas," Merkel said. "What we’re trying to do is stabilize the shoreline so that waves and wind don’t blow it away."
Merkel said the project is funded by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), and he hopes the project will limit destruction caused at Cooney State Park going forward.
"We’re hoping to prevent that in the future with this work," Merkel said. "Cooney is one of the most visited water recreation sites in the state, and we want to keep it that way."
In Red Lodge, recovery efforts continue at the former site of the Rocky Fork Inn. The building was severely damaged by the flooding and sat unused until last October, when state funding helped level the structure.
Red Lodge Mayor Dave Westwood said a lack of local funding for large projects is the cause for much of the delay.
"We don’t really have the funding to take care of large projects like that," Westwood said. "The cleanup always takes a lot longer than the event. It takes, as you can see, years to do our best and recover from them."
A field currently sits where the inn once stood. Westwood said the plan is to turn the space into a community park, and those plans will be discussed at the end of an Urban Renewal District meeting on Thursday evening at the Roosevelt Center.
"It’s seeded right now for green, and we’re still trying to decide ultimately what that’s going to look like," Westwood said.
Westwood said there will be a lot of meetings going forward before progress is made in the space. Last Thursday, there was a meeting in town finalizing the bank rebuilding project in the same area.
Westwood said the goal remains consistent: protect the area from further damage.
"They have ideas about things we can do and not do to make sure that we don’t put anything in this area or anything that would cause problems down stream as well," Westwood said.
