When a place goes away slowly, one flood at a time, it’s a different kind of grief than saying goodbye all at once. That sadness has been building up in West Alton, Missouri, for more than fifty years. The town is on a bend in the Mississippi River, close to where it meets the Missouri River. The town used to be home to about 3,900 people. Today, about 360 are left. Three churches are no longer open. Some of the homes that are still standing have been put on stilts and raised above the water, as if they were getting ready for the next wave. Most likely, they are.
The 2019 flood was the most recent big event, but it wasn’t the first. Before that, big floods in 1973 and 1993 had already killed a lot of people. Each time the water came, fewer people came back. Some may have left because they thought it was only temporary and would come back when it dried out. A lot of them didn’t. This town feels like it’s holding its breath, not because it’s excited, but because it’s ready to give up.
West Alton is not the only place with this pattern. First Street, a company that studies risks, says that flooding has forced about 30% more people to leave their homes along the Mississippi River corridor than the national average. That number is very interesting on its own. When you add in the fact that communities are already losing jobs and seeing young people leave for cities with more opportunities, the picture looks more like slow collapse.
The closeness of this economic decline makes it feel different from other kinds. These are not vague market forces. There’s water in your living room. The house is trash and you can’t sell it or fix it up because you don’t have the money to do so. It’s also on a lot that floods every few years. Since the last big flood, West Alton’s mayor Willie Richter has seen four or five empty homes catch fire. One person who was suspected of setting a house on fire said he did it because he was tired of looking at it. It’s hard to forget that part. Some places feel like they can’t handle the wreckage any longer once they’ve lost too much of themselves.
That being said, the science behind all of this is pretty cool. Geologist Harold Fisk made beautiful hand-drawn maps of the lower Mississippi in 1944. He used aerial photography to make very accurate maps of the river’s historical paths and floodplains. Daniel Coe, a cartographer, updated and added to Fisk’s work many years later using lidar technology, which uses laser pulses fired from aircraft to measure terrain to the inch. The new maps show that the river has always been changing, changing the shape of its banks, cutting off old bends, and getting wider in some places and narrower in others. “It’s like seeing fingerprints the river left behind,” Coe replied.
Those fingerprints mean something different now. A few feet of difference in elevation can mean the difference between a property flooding and not flooding. The way the river flows is changed by runoff from farms. Rainfall caused by climate change makes flood seasons longer and worse. The river isn’t getting calmer. And the towns and cities in its path are already hollowed out from decades of economic change and don’t have as many resources to handle another hit.
It’s still not clear what will happen to West Alton and the other small towns along the lower Mississippi in the long term. According to research by First Street, people who are forced to leave their homes because of flooding tend to move to safer ground nearby instead of leaving completely. However, this difference doesn’t matter as much in places where the total population is already in the hundreds. When there are only 360 people left, losing a few dozen more isn’t a number. It’s a neighborhood.
Most of the time, the people who stay are the older ones. It could be because they’ve been through it before. Perhaps because leaving means giving up something they’ve worked hard to build for a long time. The river has been there longer than all of them, and it will stay there for a long time. We are not pessimistic. It has to do with geography.
