It’s been 10 days since the floodwater receded from Cambridge City’s main street and yet signs of disaster are all around. Abandoned cars, toilets and bathtubs are strewn across parks and side streets on a recent visit to the city. Garages have been lifted from their foundations and moved by the rushing water.
Dumpsters up and down the street are overflowing with people’s belongings, with red paint sprayed on homes indicating which houses have been cleared by water rescue teams. Flooding from the Creitz Creek, a tributary of the Whitewater River, has damaged one-third, or about 250, of all houses in this quiet town of 1,700 people in south-east Indiana. About 175 of those homes have experienced significant damage.
But then, as the river swelled, it started to come back up the opposite direction,” recalls Rick Keasling of what happened on the morning of 12 August. By the time about 10 inches of rain had fallen by mid-morning – three times the average amount for the entire month of August for the town – the flood waters had risen almost five feet inside his home. He, his wife and dog fled shortly before.
We’ve lost everything on the first floor and in the basement. All the big appliances,” he says. In the north-west part of Indiana, hundreds of thousands of people in Gary, the only majority-Black city in the state, were left without electricity for more than two weeks following a derecho storm that pummeled the region on 11 August.
A section of Interstate-70, one of the most important regional highways connecting the populated eastern US with the midwest, was washed away a few miles north of Cambridge City. All the while, Indiana’s state legislature, where Republicans hold a supermajority, have repeatedly refused to fund climate-related initiatives in the state. While Indiana cut state funding for state environmental agencies by 19% between 2010 and 2024, neighboring Ohio and Michigan increased resources in their states by 19% and 78% respectively.
Twice in recent years Indiana’s senate environmental affairs committee has refused to consider legislation for a climate solutions taskforce for the state. The state’s disaster relief fund stood at just $2m before the flooding (it has since been raised to $5m) and, according to the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions, Indiana is one of 18 states with no climate action plan. Fema, too, has come in for criticism.
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