Indiana Floods — Among State's Worst in 30 Years — Kill Five

At least five people died as flooding struck Indiana with an intensity officials described as the worst in more than 30 years, inundating roads, damaging homes, and overwhelming drainage infrastructure in multiple counties. The immediate cause was sustained heavy rainfall over already-saturated ground, a pattern that climate science links to a warmer atmosphere's increased moisture-holding capacity — roughly 7% more water vapour per degree Celsius of warming. Indiana's flood risk has historically been underappreciated compared to coastal states, leaving its infrastructure design standards and emergency alert systems calibrated for a different climate baseline.

The hard governance problem here is that flood management in the US Midwest is fragmented across local drainage districts, county emergency managers, and state agencies with misaligned funding cycles and risk maps that predate observable climate change. The FEMA National Flood Insurance Program's rate maps are notoriously outdated; communities pay premiums based on historical risk while facing present-day events that exceed those historical models. Updating maps and mandating stricter building codes in newly high-risk zones is politically difficult precisely in the communities that most need it — those that would see property values repriced downward.

Watch whether Indiana's congressional delegation responds to this event by seeking updated FEMA flood maps for inland river corridors or by pushing for accelerated infrastructure investment under remaining federal resilience funding. The difference matters: map updates change who pays and who builds where, while infrastructure funding builds around the existing risk without addressing it.