Damage from the October flood could have been worse in Cayce.

“We fared very well,” said City Manager Rebecca Vance. She compared Cayce’s losses with areas in Columbia where some homes were total losses. There were no houses damaged beyond repair from flood waters in Cayce , Vance said.

Vance said city staff was enlisted to calculate the amount of damage to residences from the October floods. The data collected by Cayce officials is turned over to Lexington County disaster assessors. Those numbers are used toward the threshold for total damage assessed by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA.)

Vance said 135 residences in Cayce were inspected. She said none of the homes checked, other than one, were damaged significantly.

“We had one house that had $15,000 in damage,” Vance said last week. She said no house was damaged at the 50 percent rate required to consider it a candidate to be completely rebuilt.

Vance said the damage to residences in Cayce came to $254,000.

The deadline to file a claim for FEMA relief was Dec. 5. That date has been moved to Jan. 4, to give flood victims more time to file.

The City of Cayce had $3.9 million in claims to FEMA. Vance said so much of the damage was on Cayce’s Riverwalk. But by late November, all phases of Riverwalk, and the Timmerman Trail, were reopened, except for Phase II. Phase II has been closed since flood waters rose at the Congaree River in June.

“Phase II is mostly boardwalk,” Vance said.

She said with so much of Phase II boardwalk destroyed, city workers are looking at the possibility of building the boardwalk differently so that it is not so susceptible to flood damage.

“It’s possible we’ll re-do it and do it differently,” Vance said.

She also said the closing of Riverwalk is a reminder of how much people like it.

“We’ve had tons of people calling and asking when Riverwalk will be reopened,” Vance said.

She said the tree-laden riverside trail is a great place to get out into nature and it’s popular for that reason.