Cairo’s houses are vacant, compared with the statewide rate of only eight percent. Property taxes are high because the tax base is depleted from so many vacant houses and closed businesses, making land ownership expensive.

Constant threat of flooding Flooding has always been a fact of life for Cairo and the surrounding area, and it’s easy to see why. The city is situated at the confluence of the largest and third largest rivers in the United States, which together drain almost 1 million square miles of land and carried about 699,100 cubic feet of water per second during 2010. That’s more than 5.2 million gallons of water or eight Olympic-size swimming pools rushing past Cairo every second.

And no matter how thick or how high the levee is, the people of Cairo seem to understand one fundamental fact about water: you can stop it from coming through the wall, but you can’t stop it from going under. Water constantly seeps under the levee, requiring the city to maintain a pump system to stay dry.

Cairo has flooded repeatedly since its settlement, despite constant improvements to the levee. Especially high waters swamped the city in 1913, 1927, 1937 and 1961, among other years. An enormous 60-foot-wide gate dating from 1914 and weighing 80 tons sits several yards above Cairo’s main entrance, ready to be lowered into place to seal the levee in case of flooding.

Even though the most recent southern Illinois flood during April and May this year didn’t entirely swamp Cairo, it did cause widespread damage outside the levee, open a series of sand boils that swallowed Cairo streets, cause the partial collapse of a major train overpass atop Cairo’s levee and force an evacuation of the city because the pump system couldn’t keep up with the heavy rains and seepage.

As the water approached the top of the levee, the Army Corps of Engineers decided to blow up a separate levee constructed to relieve flooding along the Mississippi River. That action would instead flood the Birds Point-New Madrid Floodway in Missouri, which was purchased by the federal government decades before, specifically to accept floodwaters threatening towns along the rivers, but the Missouri farmers who leased the land filed a lawsuit to stop the levee from being blown up. Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan fought the lawsuit, winning a decisive victory that allowed the levee to be blown. It was during that legal fight that Missouri Speaker Tilley’s comment angered Cairo citizens.

“The Missouri people kept saying it was to save Cairo, but Cairo’s just a reference point because this is where the [flood] gauge is,” says Cairo fire chief John Meyer. “It saved several communities, and once they blew the levee, at Olive Branch, all the water was gone within a day or two. It was that significant, and everybody was wanting to say it was just ‘poor ol’ Cairo’.”

Hope and a plan Cairo mayor Demetrius Coleman has only been in office for a couple of months. He was sworn in during the recent flood crisis and spent his first night in office helping reinforce the levee with sandbags. It’s no surprise that Coleman has hit the ground running. He didn’t have a choice; it was almost literally sink or swim.

Coleman grew up in Cairo, moving away to join the Marines but later returning to live after he visited his hometown on vacation 26 years ago and realized it needed help. He worked as a self-described “community activist,” resuscitating the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), while also taking on the role of church pastor. He was later elected to a seat on the city council.

“I just felt that this community deserved better,” he says. “It took the political process for me to get to this position, but I’m not a political person, and I’ve felt that this has been one of the big contributing factors to this community being where it’s at – the politics. My focus is bringing people together.”

While walking around the large sinkholes that swallowed part of Cairo’s Commercial Street, Coleman explains that the flood was actually a blessing in disguise. The high waters revealed that the city’s pump system needs a major overhaul after years of neglect by previous administrations, and it focused state and federal attention on the city’s plight. U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin visited Cairo during the flooding, and Gov. Pat Quinn arrived later to view the damage. As a result, Cairo could get as much as $4 million in federal funds to update its pump system. President Barack Obama recently declared several southern Illinois counties, including Alexander County, to be disaster areas, making citizens of those counties eligible for grants and low-cost loans to pay for home repair and cleanup costs, among other resources.