Ten days after the water came through, the dumpsters on Cambridge City’s main street are still overflowing with ruined furniture. Red spray-paint marks the houses rescue crews already cleared. Industrial dehumidifiers drone in ground floors stripped down to the studs. And the politics that put those houses under five feet of water is still in place, doing nothing.
Cambridge City is a town of 1,700 people in southeast Indiana. The flooding from Creitz Creek, a tributary of the Whitewater River, damaged roughly 250 of those houses — about a third of every home in town. About 175 of them are significantly damaged. The morning of 12 August, ten inches of rain fell by mid-morning, three times the August average. Rick Keasling and his wife were pumping water out of their basement when the river reversed direction and came in from the other side. The dog had to swim to the truck. They lost every big appliance on the first floor and in the basement. By the time the White River crested above its 1913 record, seven people were dead, more than a thousand were homeless, and a section of Interstate 70 — one of the busiest east-west freight corridors in the country — was gone.
None of this happened in a vacuum. Indiana’s legislature, where Republicans hold a supermajority, has spent fifteen years starving the agencies that would have prepared the state for exactly this storm. Between 2010 and 2024, Indiana cut state funding for its environmental agencies by 19 percent. Neighboring Ohio raised its own by 19 percent. Michigan raised its by 78 percent. Twice in recent years, the Indiana senate’s environmental affairs committee has refused to even consider a climate solutions task force. The state’s disaster relief fund sat at $2 million before the flooding — and had to be raised to $5 million to deal with a $5 billion disaster. The Center for Climate and Energy Solutions counts Indiana as one of eighteen states with no climate action plan at all.
Beth Hall, who directs the Indiana state climate office, put the meteorology in plain language: “Climate change played a role in the intensity of the event since the warmer atmosphere would have allowed for more vapor to ultimately condense and fall as rain. Additionally, the warmer temperatures may have caused the heat dome to be the large size it was and to stick around longer than normal.” Warmer air, more rain, longer-lasting heat domes. Indiana knew. Indiana chose not to act.
The federal response has been no better. Donald Trump approved Fema disaster aid for more than fifty Indiana counties — and capped it at $5 million. The estimated cost of this month’s storms and flooding is $5 billion. Governor Mike Braun submitted a disaster declaration to Fema on 21 August. The agency has not responded. Under the current Trump administration, Fema has turned down more than thirty disaster declarations and is taking longer to approve the requests it does grant. In Gary, the only majority-Black city in the state, residents spent more than two weeks without electricity after a derecho on 11 August, and the accountability they were promised never arrived.
Cambridge City, according to First Street’s flood modeling, is rated a moderate risk. Walk two blocks and almost every wrecked house sits inside a Fema AE zone — the agency’s designation for properties with at least a one percent annual chance of flooding. Many of those buildings, including a former elementary school, sit in a “regulatory floodway,” the strictest category the agency draws. The risk was mapped. The premiums were priced out of reach. The median household income in town runs about sixty percent of the national level. People went uninsured because they could not afford to be insured. They are paying for that now.
The small businesses that are open are barely open. Tami Hall, who runs Vinton House Antiques on the main street, lost her HVAC system and most of her basement equipment to the flood. “We’ve had some people [come in] but it’s not normal,” she said. “I think people think that everything’s closed.” Tom Saunders, who sits on the town board in Lewisville — also hit — has a 69-year-old man living with him who lost his mobile home, his four cars, everything. “We’re past a week of this and we still don’t know anything,” Saunders said. “There’s nobody to help.” A volunteer food truck on the main street serves hotdogs, chips, and drinks to about seventy people a day. That is the safety net. That is the plan.
The flood was a natural disaster. The scale of it was a political choice — fifteen years of defunding the agencies that map risk, model storms, and warn the public; a statehouse that would not even vote on a climate task force; a federal emergency management system that has been hollowed out and that the White House will not fund. Keasling has flood insurance. He said himself it will not come close to covering what was lost. Down the road in Connersville, they are tearing houses down today. The water is gone. The damage it left behind is just starting.