Holding Back the River by Tyler J. Kelley

Author:Tyler J. Kelley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster
Published: 2021-04-20T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

By the spring of 2018, most of the scour holes in the floodway had been filled and the levees had been restored. The landscape appeared verdant and fruitful, as if the torrent had never happened. But the feeling of the place had changed. Houses and stores had disappeared. Cars were rare. The floodway’s population of more than two hundred had been reduced to a handful, in three or four homes.

On a gray April day seven years after the flood, no one drove down Missouri 77 and no buildings broke the monotony of trees and fields. Finally, a cluster of grain bins hove into view—first a set belonging to Pete Story, then, after an interlude of farmland, a set belonging to Pete’s cousin, John.

John Story’s office was in a clean, gray, vinyl-sided building next to a long shop and equipment shed in a town called Wolf Island. The only thing left of the town now was Story’s farm. On a flat screen in the office, Fox News was playing on mute. A shaggy dog rested in its bed beside a desk stacked neatly with papers, bills, and pay stubs.

Story didn’t lose his home—he lived twenty miles away, in Charleston—but many commercial buildings and six houses that he owned in the floodway were destroyed. His farmhands had lived in the houses as part of their pay. Because these weren’t primary residences, they were ineligible for FEMA aid. Far from helping him rebuild, it seemed to Story as if FEMA were trying to stop him. If a structure’s flood damage was greater than 50 percent of its value, FEMA would not let the owner rebuild unless the lowest floor of a new building was above the one-hundred-year floodplain, an imaginary line in the air that supposedly represented the crest of a flood that had a 1-in-100 chance of occurring in any given year. The government essentially told Story that he would have to put everything up on stilts. He walked out of a meeting with FEMA’s representatives, telling them, “I’ll be in Wolf Island putting my shit back together. If you have a problem, come see me.” FEMA never came. Since the flood, Story calculated, he’d spent $1 million rebuilding. Without flood insurance. Without loans.

He did collect crop insurance for some corn and winter wheat that washed away in 2011, though even that money was initially uncertain. His policies covered only crops damaged by acts of God, the insurance companies told him, and blowing the levee was an act of man.

Story got up from his desk, walked into another room, and unlocked a safe. He withdrew a thick binder full of documents, then flipped through the folders to find a typewritten letter. Addressed to his maternal grandparents from the Army Corps of Engineers, it read:

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.