Sometimes people are so tired that it doesn’t show on their face right away. It sets in slowly, like when someone walks through a gutted living room without flinching or talks about how they watched four feet of water swallow their furniture like it was the weather report. That tiredness has become a kind of local language in some rural parts of Missouri. Here, people speak flood very well. They’ve always done that.
In Missouri’s flood-prone river towns, like Rhineland, Pattonsburg, and Mosby, the cycle is well-known: the water rises, homes fill with water, people tear them down and rebuild, federal money comes slowly, and after two or three years, a fragile sense of normalcy returns. After that, the river comes back. In some of these towns, what’s going on now isn’t just another flood recovery. Recovery in the traditional sense is being looked at to see if it is still a good idea.
Rhineland did a good job, or as good a job as anyone can do. The National Weather Service said the 1993 floods were the most expensive and destructive to ever hit the U.S., and the town of about 150 people made a choice that most communities that have been through floods only talk about.
They moved around. The whole town, or at least most of it, was moved north less than a quarter mile to a 40-acre site that was higher up. Trailers with houses on them were used to move the houses uphill. The lots were given out by chance. If neighbors didn’t agree, they traded places. Most people who were there said it was a very civil process that took place in very harsh conditions.
The same thing happened in Pattonsburg. In July 1993, two 500-year floods turned the town’s streets into what looked like a swimming pool. The 300 people who lived there eventually took FEMA’s $12 million and started over four miles away on a farmer’s land, with the cute condition that one street be named Meadows. The new Pattonsburg has sidewalks but almost no curbs. It also has a strip mall with a gun shop and a school whose student body keeps slowly decreasing. It feels weird and unfinished, like a town that was built quickly but never had a chance to become its own thing.
It’s still not clear if these moves fixed the issue or just pushed back the release of the next version. It’s getting harder to tell what the weather will do in the Midwest. In 2019, communities were hit by flooding that wasn’t a single disaster. It happened over time, slowly, and hurt the economy in ways that a one-time FEMA buyout isn’t really meant to fix. Nearly half of the people in Mosby, which is northeast of Kansas City, have applied to be bought out after what city officials say are about 40 floods of varying levels of severity in the last 20 years. Half a town demolished, leaving a patchwork of holdout neighbors and bare lots. There’s something quietly heartbreaking about that picture of a community split in two by a river, not by politics or money.
People who live there aren’t stupid. A lot of them know what the odds are. Talking to people in these towns makes me think that staying is less about denying things and more about being attached to the land, the people they live with, and a way of life that they feel they can’t get back somewhere drier. Before taking a $45,000 offer to leave her Mosby home, Tammy Kilgore lived there for 38 years. She drove back to see the excavator take it down. That’s not how someone who has given up acts. It’s the act of someone trying to get closure on a situation that doesn’t really give them any.
It’s hard to see, but it’s important to say, that federal and state programs are still better at responding to disasters than stopping the next one. More than $5 billion has been spent over three decades buying out flood-vulnerable properties across the country. That’s real money, and it has moved real families to safer ground. But it hasn’t stopped people from moving into flood plains or fixed the infrastructure problems that make small river towns so vulnerable. It also hasn’t taken what climate models say is coming into account.
People in these Missouri towns are not waiting for that to happen. Cleaning up, making decisions in late-night council meetings, negotiating over who gets which lot, and building again are all things they’ve always done. They have no control over whether the river gives them enough time to make it last this time or any other time.
