The Unluckiest Town In America?
This little town just a couple hours from me highlights why we have to rework how we hand insurance and government aid. It is just one story of many, but Time Magazine happened to pick of their story.
It was early evening in Grand Tower, Ill., and Josh Franklin, 23, was standing outside his aunt’s double-wide 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 when the next big earthquake will hit, since the town sits within the New Madrid Seismic Zone, one of the continent’s most violent.
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.
Now Grand Tower residents are anxiously watching the surrounding rivers. Stubborn bands of storms have saturated the region’s corn and soybean fields, swelling the Mississippi River and its tributaries above St. Louis, Mo. Today the rising waters were only about two hours’ drive to the north. Some 21 Illinois counties and all of Missouri have been declared disaster zones, and dozens of points along the Mississippi River’s levees in both states have ruptured. “We’re just standing by, hoping for the best but expecting the worst,” says Burke “Bear” Ellett, 49, Grand Tower’s mayor for the past dozen years. If the floods ravage the town, there probably won’t be any money to rebuild it.
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