Word: floods
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...trailer. He'd like to move away from this community of 585 people to Carbondale, a college town about half an hour's drive to the north. But he can't afford to. Grand Tower isn't much of anyplace anymore. Its last restaurant closed shortly after the great flood of 1993. There isn't a bookstore. Don't even ask about wi-fi access. "If we get a major flood," he says, "it's all over. A lot of small towns, they've just disappeared. We're going to be next." The floods are certainly coming. And who knows...
This tiny town on Illinois's southern tip is caught between catastrophes, literally. A dispute with the Federal Government has resulted in its loss of flood insurance - unless the impoverished town takes expensive measures, like hoisting homes and the few remaining businesses on stilts a dozen feet into the air. But if they scratch together the money to do so, it will be impossible to afford earthquake insurance, which is already prohibitively expensive...
...deluge that swamped Iowa and much of the Upper Midwest was supposed to be a 500-year flood. Fifteen years later, Iowans are rethinking that judgment. In a spring of calamitous weather, the state's can-do stoicism was tested by two tornadoes; one tore through a Boy Scout camp and killed four teenagers. Rains then swelled the rivers and strained the levees, which burst indiscriminately. Iowa's second largest city, Cedar Rapids (pop. 124,000), and one of its smallest towns, Chelsea (pop. 276), were inundated. On Friday the 13th, downtown Des Moines was under voluntary evacuation. The surge...
...Rinderspacher, a friend Metzler has stayed with, worked for two days to move items out of his irrigation and landscaping business. Flood water came within a foot of his building, then stopped. "It's kind of surreal," he says. "Physically, you're exhausted from doing all this stuff and emotionally you're exhausted from thinking about it and wondering what...
...Here in Des Moines, we've had flooding in pockets but have fared relatively well so far, compared to eastern Iowa (and to the 1993 flood). There's relief that the downtown area has largely been spared major damage, thanks to bolstered flood protection post-1993. But feverish attempts to bolster a levee near a neighborhood north of downtown ultimately failed. Watching televised scenes of water rushing over destroyed sandbags into streets where people live and work was not what my teenage son and I, among hundreds of volunteer sandbaggers in Des Moines, had hoped to see. But like many...