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Comment by losvedir | Hacker News Reader

Something like this happened a few years ago where I live.[0]

Basically, the Army blew the levee to save a town, Cairo, IL, at the expense of (a few) homes and (lots of) farmland on the MO side. Maciej (HN user idlewords) mentioned it in one of his interesting blog posts[1].

The blog post asserts:

> The farmers downriver got their fields fertilized with rich river silt and are wealthier and more resentful than ever. Like so many beneficiaries of big government, they remain its implacable foes.

which I've never been able to source, though I've been curious about it. AFAICT most of the farmers left and never returned to the area.

[0]http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/columns/pat-gauen/saving-...

[1] http://idlewords.com/2015/07/confronting_new_madrid_part_2.h...

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Yeah there's a lot left out of that blog post. The assumption seems to be that flooding fields is always a good thing. That's goofy on its face; destroying all the crops in the field is at least a short-term harm to the farmer. Even if crop insurance covers most of the crop destruction, the field will also require regrading of some sort. If the field is inundated so that there is a current flowing over it rather than just still water backing up, which is very common around structures such as partially destroyed levees, topsoil is removed rather than deposited.

The weird thing about this point of view is that the US Army Corps of Engineers are lionized for their continued mismanagement of the War on Flowing Water (like all Wars the army fights, it loses this one too!) while private entities like Little River who have done a better job for a longer time are sneered at for their presumed lack of earthquake preparedness. (Why worry about excess rain it only comes once every couple of years; the earthquake that happens once a millennium should be the big worry!)

Blog post says more about the philosophy of blogger than about reality.

Fun Midwest fact: The name of Cairo, IL is pronounced differently than the city in Egypt. I've always heard it pronounced more like "Care-O"

And in Missouri we have New Madrid ("New MAD-rid") and Versailles ("Ver-SAILS") among several other similar re-pronunciations.

Many locals pronounce Johnny Carson's teenage hometown Norfolk, Nebraska as "Norfork."

I don't think it comes from ignorance though (and I'm not saying you're saying it does) but instead just a way of taking local ownership.

California is rife with towns having mispronounced Spanish names.

My grandfather in Kentucky pronounced Missouri 'Mizurah'.

I lived in the middle of Missouri from 1994 through 2014 and never once heard a voice say Missour-ah that wasn't coming from a candidate for office on TV.

(To be fair, there might have been some people in rural parts of the state who did talk like that. But usually it's coming from people who probably shouldn't.)

The authentic pronunciation is more of a short "i" than a short "a". FYI, linguistic prescriptivism sucks.

I didn't say that people should pronounce Missouri only as "Missour-ee" and that other pronunciations are incorrect.

I offered my observation (intended with good humor) that it's not really true that Missourians by and large say "Missour-ah" -- or "Missour-ih" if you like -- but rather it's pretty much only politicians trying hard to sound folksy, and maybe a few older people in the most rural parts.

That's how The Outlaw Josie Wales pronounces it when he gives the red-legs chasing him, "a Missurah boat ride."

Sinai South Dakota is pronounced "Sign Yi."

> Basically, the Army blew the levee to save a town, Cairo, IL, at the expense of (a few) homes and (lots of) farmland on the MO side.

Are you sure about the "homes" part?

20 years ago, I was a professor at Southeast Missouri State University in Cape Girardeau. As part of new faculty orientation, we took a bus tour of the area. During the trip, we passed through the Birds Point-New Madrid Floodway. We were told that no one was allowed to live there, so that it could be flooded on short notice without endangering people or their homes.

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