When the wild rice pollinates just like any other kind of flowering plant, it smells so
fresh and so from the Earth.
That’s what reminds me of home.
That smell.
I could just smell the rice growing and coming up out of the water.
I travelled everywhere in this United States, and of all the places, this is the place I
would rather be, than anywhere.
Anywhere.
Small town America.
Just like a lot of other little towns across the country.
It’s that type of town.
Population of 900.
You had to wave at everybody because you knew everybody.
So it was a very, very nice little small town.
Hundred of families now face the very real possibility of losing their homes.
The true impact of the levy break wouldn’t be known until sunrise.
We’ve watched the silos go, we’ve watched the barn go, we’ve watched a shed go, and
now the house itself has been lifted off the foundation by these flood waters it’s just
unbelievable.
We’ve had this fourth of July celebration for the past four decades.
It was always through Main Street of the old town here and we still had freight and it’s
kind of funny because a lot people sit where they used to always sit, before the flood,
in front of either their house or friends’ homes.
And it’s just hard to, how you say, let go.
Valmeyer was catastrophically flooded, up to the third floor in some cases, after the
great midwestern flood of 1993.
Its levy broke and a wall of water came in.
And in the aftermath Valmeyer decided ‘never again.’
And it built an all new town up about 300 feet higher on the bluffs overlooking the
Mississippi River, but not threatened by that river.
We looked at several locations for the relocation.
We didn’t want to go too far from where the original town was.
If we didn’t keep it close to the old town and keep the identity and keep some of the
things, traditions, and activities and things of the original town area, I don’t think
we would have gotten participation from as many of our residents as we did.
Yeah so we have five structures mapped right here and obviously there’s only two houses.
So we’re going to tag this
We’re looking at about a dozen US towns.
These are mostly small, rural, floodplain towns that have addressed flood risk through
drastic action.
What we do is we actually quantify the move: How many structures, what type of structures
are left on the floodplain, how many have moved.
We’ll use that data to model how much flood damage has been averted and try to quantify
the success rather than just judging from anecdotal reports.
All of these communities that have moved are different and that’s part of the spectrum
that we’re trying to flesh out.
What you see, if we turn this way, but right here, is one of the most ancient ruins over
there, and that’s where the main village was at right here.
Valmeyer and Odanah are clearly different.
Valmeyer proudly promotes its move as a big success, as part of its new heritage, if you
will.
Odanah is the exact opposite.
In terms of number of structures no longer on the floodplain, which is how FEMA would
measure it, it’s a near total success.
However, you talk to at least some of the residents and they’ll tell you a different
story.
50 years ago, there was this post office here, gas station and houses all along here.
Houses all along here.
Houses over here, and all through the old town here.
50 years ago.
Now it’s all gone because somebody said we shouldn’t live where we had been living
for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years.
I want to move back down there.
I want to stay alongside the river.
You see that is our heritage.
That’s why we live to stay close to that water, because that’s a part of our medicine
what we have, is in by that water.
I’ll move back to it right now.
I don’t care about the flood.
We can always fight the flood.
It just lasts us a couple of days.
It doesn’t last a lifetime.
But just living alongside that water, that’s what I’d rather have.
Clearly the town of Odanah, the Chippewa tribe, has a whole history that’s very different
than other relocation communities.
The reality is Odanah is more of a mixed success.
Success to FEMA.
But we got at least some strong sentiments within the town that they do not see this
as a uniform positive.
The story tells itself.
It’s not for us to tell the story of Odanah, it’s for Odanah’s people to tell that
story.
Managed retreat is on the lips of a lot of politicians.
Some where between three and perhaps even seven hundred communities across the US may
be at threat of serious and repeated inundation within the next hundred years.
And here are the lessons of how to guide that.
There are successful and even unsuccessful relocation efforts in the past.
We need to learn from each of those and not fund things from scratch every time they become
pressing.
We need to look at the full tool kit, the full spectrum of solutions available to it.