Boyd White, Lincoln County’s head of emergency management, parks his car on Granite Creek Road outside of Libby. Ahead of him is a gash in the roadway where a bridge once stood.
"Granite Creek enters into Cherry Creek just a little ways out of sight up here from us," White points out.
The jagged edge of asphalt marks where Big Cherry Creek swelled to forces capable of dislocating boulders. Boyd peers over the gap, looking down at the small creek below that caused the damage.
"We went from a streambed that was probably 200 feet across, to probably 400 to 500 feet across," he says.
The historic December floods physically changed the community. Though the intense weather tore up bridges, toppled trees and flooded homes, no lives were lost.
That's because Libby knows floods. Records of major floods in the area date back to 1933. A closer look at that history shows decades of mitigation measures, plans and preparations, that officials say prevented further catastrophe in December.
The largest example of these efforts is the Flower Creek Dam. Located just south of Libby, the dam sits on Flower Creek, which flows into the Kootenai River. It was built in 1946 to hold the town’s reservoir, retaining over 92 million gallons of water.
It’s a “high hazard” dam, which means if it fails, people will die. County Commissioner Jim Hammons remembers when that threat felt too close for comfort.
"I think in 2013 and '14, they'd realized with some of the core samples that that dam was in serious need of replacement," Hammons says.
Core samples are taken when engineers drill out a cylinder of material from the dam. Normally, they look like tubes of solid concrete.
"The core samples that we took out were coming out in just chunks and literally broken up like gravel. So that's what was inside the dam," Hammons says.
Hammons worked as the City Administrator at the time. He says catching the dam’s issues when they did relative to recent floods was a near miss.
"I don't think it would have held up through some of these major events that we've had with the water, rainstorms," he says. "No, in fact, I'm almost sure that it probably wouldn't have held out."
Dam construction began in 2015. Victor White was the Emergency Manager for Lincoln County, which is now his brother’s role. He himself lives just downstream. His job was to prepare for the worst: a dam failure.
"How do you plan for something to break that will be, within just a few minutes, covering the town," Vicctor wondered.
He developed a text-alert system. He formed evacuation plans for neighborhoods, businesses and elementary schools. In a tight-knit community, Victor says the task felt heavy.
"All I could think about in that time, and we had that team working on how can we – we had a future of kids out there – how do we take care of them?"
A year and $15 million later, the dam was finished. Flash forward to December 2025 when seven inches of rain fell in 24 hours. The floods damaged a diversion structure downstream, but the upper dam held.
Back in City Hall, Emergency Manager Boyd White sits in his office surrounded by photos of the storm damage and maps of flood plains.
"We came out of it pretty well, I think," Boyd says. "But we've still got some work to do that could make things better for the future."
The severe flooding resulting in such widespread impact stemmed from an abnormal weather pattern that brought heavy rain on top of winter snow.
Similar weather caused flooding in 1933, 1974 and 2015.
"If I were to get these types of weather patterns and predictions coming in from NOAA again – that, I would probably be more concerned," Boyd says.
Looking forward, these events might be more common. Climate models for this region predict increased winter precipitation that falls as rain rather than snow.
"Certainly it seems like we are getting warmer weather later into the winter on a pretty regular basis," Boyd says.
He believes preparation means planning, investing in infrastructure and updating their floodplain maps to learn where they can mitigate impacts. They also have a county-wide hazard mitigation plan that is reviewed annually.
For Boyd, this is what helped save lives during the recent floods in Lincoln County. But it also better positions them to receive state and federal financial support.
Damages are currently estimated to cost over $10 million.
"Ten million dollars on the county and we have to put that out in advance while we're waiting for all this, you know, red tape to work through. That's a burden, especially for a poor county like Lincoln County."
For now, their focus is on fixing the roads and bridges and preparing for a future where winter floods might be more common.
Boyd works by his mantra, “I kind of plan for the worst and hope for the best.”
