#today 100 year rainfall record in St Louis with major flash flooding in streets just as worker strikes begin at all 3 Boeing plants in St Lo

[fatehbaz]

St Louis is where storms collide.

Without the moderating effect of a coastline or major mountain range, cold air sweeps unopposed down from the Arctic to meet a warm, humid front marching north from the Gulf of Mexico. The two finally lock in combat over the Mississippi flatlands, emptying their arsenals to barrage the area with blizzards, thunderstorms, and tornados. In recent years, growing climate chaos has only intensified this ambient war, each “extreme weather event” more volatile and less predictable. And as the air currents grapple over the middleAmerican sky, the storm-swollen Mississippi grinds forward below. Once-uncommon “freak floods” are now standard, the levees overcome every few years and large chunks of St Louis and its surrounding suburbs washed away by the intractable inertia of a river bound to outlive any city.

The result is another slow apocalypse.

In January 2016, people from the surrounding suburbs poured into Red Cross shelters, unable to return to homes torn apart by the rising water. But even with such disasters gradually becoming the new, more violent equilibrium, federal aid is perpetually insufficient. [...] Politics in these conditions can only appear apolitical, as all functional organizing is given political significance when confronted with devastation of such scale: Baptists and Mennonites organizing supply caravans through the wreckage of long-decayed postwar suburbs, the crosses emblazoned on their white vans floating above silt-clogged cul-de-sacs.

Such stories of environmental destruction are, however, only one dimension of a much-deeper global economic catastrophe that takes different forms in different regions.

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In many ways, St Louis is a city without a region, stuck between the Midwest, the South, and the Great Plains - and as such it seems to act as a sort of vaguely generalizable image of a mythic middle America slowly being lost. 

Economically, it’s an intersection between Rust Belt and Corn Belt, only barely outside the new sunbelt yet falling short of its river-port counterparts. It was one of the many cities left behind by the wave of deindustrialization. After its postwar heyday, the entire metro area saw massive population loss, at first concentrated downtown but soon spreading out to neighboring suburbs as well. This process only deepened long-standing racial divides. Meanwhile, attempts to resuscitate the city by focusing on capital-intensive manufacturing and biotech have only ensured a further cloistering of wealth and a hardening of racial divides between neighborhoods.

Today postwar houses and small clusters of low-rise apartment complexes are sprinkled out across the humid floodplain. When the river overspills its levees, entire suburban cities can be washed away, as was the case in the small, predominantly white working-class suburb of West Alton in 2016. Wedged between the Missouri and Mississippi, just before their confluence north of St Louis proper, the entire city was evacuated, with a quarter to a third of the population expected never to return. [...]

There are small islands of gentrification within the city proper, as well as the remains of more affluent suburbs, largely west of the city -- the foremost of these being small municipalities like Town and Country, a largely white golf course suburb that boasts the highest median income of any city in Missouri. These richer locales are buffered by a spectrum of poorer ones [...].

In St Louis, these divergent dynamics are colliding, and the city is being reshaped according to this economic battle, itself only an echo of that greater chaos foreboded by warring storms.

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All text above by: Phil Neel. Hinterland: America’s New Landscape of Class and Conflict. 2018. [Some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me. Presented here for commentary, teaching, criticism purposes.]