Floods and storms are altering American attitudes to climate change

Four generations of one family run Riverdock Restaurant in Hardin, a small town on a spit of wooded land between the swollen Illinois and Mississippi rivers. The matriarch is Sara Heffington, in red t-shirt and jeans. She says the Illinois river usually passes 400 feet (120 metres) from the long, ground-floor room where they serve biscuits and sausage gravy. Today water laps at the front door. She recalls a previous deluge, as they prepared to open in 1993. Back then, a levee broke and neck-high, muddy water submerged them. “That was a one-in-500-year flood,” she says.

Americas's Midwest is soaked and less sceptical.

In years when lots of snow melts upstream or increasingly stormy spring rain overfills midwestern rivers, the Heffingtons get gravel from a nearby quarry, fill bags and build a defensive wall. At the moment an oozing white barrier again surrounds their restaurant as diesel-pumps spit defiant jets back towards the river.

Read the story from the Economist - “Floods and storms are altering American attitudes to climate change.”