POSTED: Saturday, July 5, 2008 -- 5:30pm

"The most important thing is to get them re-focused on how to come out of this pit of problems and stress that they have," says FEMA mitigation expert, Stan Ballentine.

This is FEMA's main goal as they lead workshops to educate homeowners about how protect their homes from flood damage.

"We have found that every dollar that we spend in preparation we save about 4 dollars in the tax money in helping people get their homes back together."

Their series of workshops kicked off Thursday afternoon at the Stoughton Fair. FEMA mitigation experts talked with homeowners there showing them the important things they need to know to help prevent disastrous flooding situations like what we've seen across south central Wisconsin.

"To stop this devastation from happening again we need to plan," says flood victim, Dean Connell. "(We need to) learn from these mistakes and see where we can get from there."

Connell considers himself one of the lucky ones. Only a few acres of his farmland is underwater, but seeing what happened to the many homeowners in the area is enough for him to want to take preventative action.

"We're going to learn from this. This is a 500 year deal and we all need to learn from it so we can prevent this in the future if possible."

FEMA plans on holding these workshops at several other local fairs over the next few weeks and hopes to explain that prevention is just as important as recovery.

If you'd like to attend they will be at the following fairs:

Dane County: Stoughton Fair, July 3rd-6th 10:00am - 9:00pm

Jefferson County: Jefferson Fair, July 9th-13th 12:00pm – 9:00pm

Dane County: Madison Fair, July 16th–20th 11:00am – 10:00pm

Waukesha County: Pewaukee, July 16th–20th 10:00 am – 10:00pm

Fond du Lac County: July 16th – 20th

Columbia County: Portage Fair, July 23rd–27th

Winnebago County: Oshkosh Fair, Aug 6th–10th