Cairo, Illinois

They have blown levees that protected Mississippi County in Missouri in order to save Cairo, Illinois.  The good farmers whose land and homes are being inundated think the proposition is absurd.  Let that city go, they say.

Cairo sits at the confluence of the Mississippi and the Ohio.  It was once a prosperous place, Grant's first major command headquarters, where Civil War troops were assembled and gunships were built, launched and anchored, and, as shown in a famous incident involving Grant, a center for the telegraph that revolutionized the conduct of war.  It was a commercial crossroads, exemplified by the Custom House, built in 1872.

But mostly it's a ruined ghost town now, with or without a flood, fewer than 3000 desperate souls, with a very troubled racial history.

I'm not sure about the trade-off.  If saving what's left of Cairo means that there will be a new effort to make it into a place people might actually want to live...  well OK, I will listen to that.  But if it leaves a lot of still-rotting buildings, instead of letting them wash away - I'd be in favor of the washing away.  The river has taken islands, land, even towns before.  Maybe we should have given Cairo back.