The floods washed away a water line at Pine Ridge and while it was being repaired, the reservation didn't have safe drinking water. The waters have also prevented people from being able to get to grocery stores and pharmacies, and that's in a place of 20,000 people, half of whom live below the poverty line, where health problems are an issue without the roads to the doctor and, well, food being cut off.
What does it mean that the road was cut off? Here's what one highway in Iowa looked like a few days ago:
How fucked are things in the Midwest right now? Those Iowa roads will take months to repair, with some not expected to open until the fall because the ground is so saturated they can't even get in the construction equipment to start work.
Oh, and the water in all these places is likely fucked, especially for people who rely on wells. See, floods tends to take anything they wash over with them, including shit and poison that covers the farms all over the region. That shit and poison is now polluting the wells. In 300 counties in 10 states are over a million people who rely on water from ground wells that could get a dose of poisonous shit water. We're not even talking about the Superfund clean-up sites that were already contaminated and that were hit by the floods in Nebraska and Missouri. More free-flowing chemical nightmares.
And there's the farmers. Yeah, that contaminated flood water is also fucking up the lives of thousands of farmers. It's not just that whatever crops they thought they might grow are gone. It's that the grain and soybeans they had in storage got contaminated by the poisonous shit water. That means that what a farmer hoped to sell to make up for how terrible things might be with the crops is now mostly going to have to be destroyed. And currently, the USDA doesn't have a fund to assist farmers with crops and stored grain lost in floods. Hundreds of thousands of acres of farm land were or are underwater. For soybean farmers already getting fucked by Trump's trade war with China, it's a double blow.
Trump is talking a good pro-farmer game right now as he intensifies his hate-fucking of Puerto Rico, which he sees as less worthy of government help than the almighty farmer. But Trump's 2020 budget proposal fucks over farmers nearly as badly; it cuts the budget of the USDA by over 14%, or $3.6 billion, and lowers the crop insurance subsidies for farmers, as well as capping what small farmers can get. Plus, if he closes the border with Mexico, well, that closes a huge market for American crops.
Just a continuous fucking by the potent combination of utter incompetence, complete ignorance, and willful dickishness that is the standard operating ethos of the Trump administration.
Meanwhile, the one issue that combines all of these issues, from South Dakota to Puerto Rico, climate change, ain't even on Trump's radar. But you can sure as hell bet it's on the minds of farmers. They fuckin' know, even if they want to pretend otherwise. The same goes for immigration issues. They know how shit works.
Of course, they're gonna have to figure out if their farms matter more than their racism in 2020.
