Salina ? Flooding from recent thunderstorms has left bridges washed out and roads with major damage in Saline County, with one official saying 75 percent to 80 percent of the county’s roads should be closed.

That’s not likely to happen, though, for several reasons.

“We do not have the capacity or the manpower or the signage to do that,” Road and Bridge Department Director Dave Nowak told county commissioners Tuesday. “On top of that, if you close 75 percent of the roads in this county, how are people going to get around?”

The full extend of the damage remains to be seen, Nowak said, with several roads still submerged.

“Unless you leave the Salina city limits, you cannot even begin to imagine what has happened in Saline County,” Nowak said. “I think the thing that’s important to talk about is that these things are not fixed within a week or two weeks or a month or a year. We’re going to be dealing with this for years. It’s going to take years to recover.”

The damage is worst in northeast Saline County, where heavy rain earlier this month caused the Smoky Hill River to leave its banks and flood the New Cambria area.

“The waters went down, and now we’re starting to see we still may have a state of disaster,” Commissioner Craig Stephenson said. “Some of the damage is just hard to even comprehend, from wooden-structure bridges being carried completely away to river banks eroding out the county roads.”

Nowak said many roads in the county have been stripped of their gravel, making them rough for travel, and several bridges were submerged entirely during the flooding.

The county is applying for state financial assistance.

Steve Swartz, a spokesman for the Kansas Department of Transportation, said Wednesday that there was little lasting damage to state-maintained roads.

Those roads would be able to handle any traffic increase from unusable county roads, Swartz said.