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New storms threaten catastrophic flood zone in Indiana and could create more floods across the Midwest

By CNN

MIDWEST STORMS UNLEASH ‘CATASTROPHIC’ FLOODING (4AMET)

(CNN) — More heavy rain is headed to flood-ravaged Indiana as new rounds of storms track across the Midwest for the fifth consecutive day, threatening to spark new floods and destruction across the tattered region.

⛈️☔️In one of the impacted areas? Track the storms, find out your local risk and get more detailed timing from meteorologists in the CNN Weather app⛈️☔️

Parts of Indiana saw a 1-in-1000 year rainfall event on Wednesday that sent floodwater rushing into homes, forced evacuations and rescues and left roads impassable. This came one day after a deadly derecho – a rare, unusually long-lasting windstorm – tore through the Midwest, and the region will not get a meaningful break from the storms until this weekend.

Here’s the latest:

  • More flooding to come: More than 20 million people from Iowa to West Virginia are in flood watches for additional bouts of rain that are expected to sweep through these areas on Thursday and Friday. Saturated ground and swollen rivers will make it easier for even modest rainfall to cause new problems.
  • Rivers still rising: At least three rivers have hit major flood stage in eastern Indiana. One of those is the White River in Muncie, Indiana, which was cresting at its highest level in over 80 years on Thursday morning. The river is expected to crest at its highest level in more than 100 years downstream in Anderson, Indiana, by Thursday evening.
  • Flash flood emergencies: Parts of seven counties in eastern Indiana were under the highest level of flood warning Wednesday. Parts of the region have seen multiple months’ worth – 6 to nearly 12 inches – of rain so far this week.
  • Widespread outages persist: More than 250,000 homes and businesses are without power in Indiana as of Thursday morning, according to PowerOutage.us. Just over 400,000 customers remain in the dark across the Midwest and Ohio Valley for the second consecutive day.

‘Catastrophic’ flooding grips Indiana

Cambridge City, about an hour east of Indianapolis, reported “catastrophic” flooding late Wednesday morning, warning residents in a social media post to be prepared to potentially lose utilities for “a number of days” due to the storms. The town is currently under a boil-water advisory.

Video obtained by CNN shows floodwater covering large sections of the town, with water levels well past many houses’ windows and cars almost entirely submerged. Officials have urged residents in certain parts of Cambridge City to evacuate, Wayne County Emergency management Agency spokesperson Todd Harmeson told CNN. First responders also used boats to conduct rescues, as most of the roads in town were impassable, he said.

Floodwater was waist deep in parts of nearby New Castle, Kendra Blankenship, assistant to the city’s mayor, told CNN, noting city buses were being used to transport people evacuating the floods to a temporary shelter.

New Castle received more than 11 inches of rain in 32 hours – a 1-in-1000-year rainfall rate. This only has a 0.1% chance of happening in given year, under normal circumstances. But extreme rainfall is becoming more common as the atmosphere warms.

Homes were also flooded farther north in Muncie, where officials were working to evacuate an area with about 200 homes, city spokesperson Amber Greene told CNN Wednesday morning. About a dozen people had to be rescued by boat, and responders were returning to pick up more, Greene added.

Roadways were flooded throughout Muncie, Greene said, and what was supposed to be the first day of school for the city school system has been postponed due to flooding.

By Wednesday night, some water rescues were still ongoing, but the flooding had stabilized in the city, Muncie Fire Chief Daniel Burford told CNN.

Indiana Gov. Mike Braun said multiple roads were washed out and “a lot of water rescues” were conducted in flood-ravaged areas Wednesday.

Deadly storms hit Midwest on Tuesday

Wednesday’s storms come a day after a deadly line of severe weather swept through Illinois, Indiana and Ohio.

A 4-year-old boy died in southeastern Indiana on Tuesday after a tree fell on a house in Geneva Township, according to Cody Low, chief deputy for the Jennings County sheriff’s department.

One person was found dead Tuesday in Portage, Indiana, from an apparent explosion and house fire after the derecho moved through the area. The cause remains under investigation, but police suspect trees knocked down by the storm may have damaged natural gas lines.

A utility that serves northern Indiana experienced its largest outage event in company history on Tuesday, according to a social media post.

Punishing week of storms continues

Iowa and Illinois, flood-ravaged Indiana and parts of the Appalachians are at risk for more flooding rain on Thursday on Friday.

A complex of storms ongoing in Iowa on Thursday morning is expected to rumble east toward northern Illinois and southern Wisconsin by this afternoon.

These storms may eventually run out of steam, but new ones in their wake will likely form by late Thursday in Iowa and Illinois. Those storms could build eastward across parts of Indiana, Ohio, Kentucky and West Virginia through the overnight hours into Friday morning.

A Level 3 of 4 risk of flooding rainfall has been issued in parts of Indiana, southwest Ohio and north-central Kentucky through early Friday. Another 1 to 3 inches of rain is likely across this already water-logged area, but much higher totals up to 6 inches in spots are possible if storms stall out over the same areas for too long.

Storms could also stall out elsewhere in the Midwest and cause significant flooding late Thursday into Friday; Iowa and northern Illinois have the greatest potential for that.

The heavy rain threat could finally ease by Friday afternoon in the hard-hit Ohio Valley, but the Upper Mississippi Valley and parts of the Great Lakes could see more downpours through Saturday.

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Bulldozers rip into Big Bend National Park, driving anger and heartbreak

By CNN
Big Bend National Park, Texas (CNN) — The towering cliffs, jagged mountain tops, and punishing desert climate of the Big Bend region in Texas have long proved to be the best barrier the United States could have with Mexico. For generations, the idea of needing to build physical structures to stop illegal migration was considered “insane,” as one former superintendent of Big Bend National Park said.But now the expansive reach of President Donald Trump’s southern border plan has stretched into this remote region that sees only about 1% of unauthorized crossing apprehensions. Bulldozers are clearing land in the beloved national park, where wildlife roams and the scenery has been untouched for thousands of years.“We didn’t have to worry about any type of barrier. We had a God-made barrier,” said Sheriff Thaddeus Cleveland of Terrell County, a vast and sparsely populated area northeast of the park. He spent 26 years in the US Border Patrol, hearing little if any talk of needing extra infrastructure in the area where he grew up, he said. “But that’s definitely changed.”US Customs and Border Protection says it’s not planning to build the same kind of 30-foot-high barrier that has appeared across parts of Arizona, California, New Mexico and Texas inside the national park. But critics say the plan that is in the works is no less destructive.Earlier this month, bulldozers were videoed uprooting trees and shoveling dirt as wild animals trotted by. They were doing preliminary work ahead of the budgeted $1.72 billion main construction project designated for the area inside Big Bend National Park, the agency said.It’s part of the bigger plan to finish the border wall — or some form of it — before Trump leaves office, with steel walls and vehicle barriers and hundreds of miles of new roads cutting through wildly remote areas.Those with concerns or outright opposition to the work in this remote desert wilderness run the gamut from a few elected Republicans to young activists, sweeping in a pro-border control sheriff and a retired National Park Service superintendent.Photographer Natalie Newman made a commitment to Big Bend back in February when then-Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem waived certain federal laws related to environmental safety, historic preservation and wildlife protection, among other initiatives, saying there was “an acute and immediate need to construct additional physical barriers and roads” in the Big Bend region.“It started out as just documenting the beauty of it, trying to get people to see why it’s special and what makes it special and what makes it so beautiful and worth protecting. But that has transformed just over the last week,” she told CNN, standing near Santa Elena Canyon, where tall cliffs rise nearly 1,500 feet high from the Rio Grande and where she first saw bulldozers working in the national park.“More than anything else, I feel heartbreak over all of this,” she said. Newman enjoys the wilder parts of this park that’s larger than the state of Rhode Island, where you may see fewer people than javelinas — a mammal that looks like a small wild pig, though it’s an entirely different species. Cacti and wildflowers bloom across the state and federal land around Big Bend, which coupled with even larger nature preserves across the border are part of the Chihuahuan desert, the largest such ecosystem in North America.But these days when her binoculars are trained on something in the distance, she’s more likely to be checking on the progress of road clearing than on any of the hundreds of bird species that frequent the park. She said she will keep sharing that news, doing her part to stand up for the national park.“I’m hopeful every single day that it’ll be the day that someone somewhere does something that puts a stop to it,” she said.If there is no stopping, retired park superintendent Bob Krumenaker said what could happen in Big Bend would rival the flooding of Hetch Hetchy Valley a century ago, an event that changed arguments about preserving the environment. It’s why he labels the whole plan “insane.”“If they continue with this and build most of the things they have talked about, or even a good fraction of those, this will be the biggest desecration of the national park system — not just Big Bend National Park — since they built a dam in a pristine valley in Yosemite National Park more than 100 years ago. This is a story that our children and grandchildren will be telling,” he told CNN.Compounding the natural destruction is the damage being done to people’s trust, Krumenaker added.“It’s just a tremendous erosion, if not violation, of the agreement that Texans and the American people made when they established that national park. The federal government that I worked for for 41 years is disrespecting its citizens in a in a huge way.”Krumenaker, now chairman of the Keep Big Bend Wild advocacy group, spent five years as superintendent of Big Bend National Park and is familiar not only with the multiple studies and approvals needed for any material changes, but also with his federal partners in Border Patrol and the need for security.“I totally support a secure border in Big Bend, but this is the least active place in the country for illegal border crossings,” he said. “This is purely political, and it will, it risks destroying one of the nation’s greatest places. It’s just horrible.”He recalled as superintendent having an annual budget of between $8 million and $9 million and a maintenance to-do list of about $100 million they would chip away at when they could. Those numbers are dwarfed by the $1.72 billion earmarked for the Big Bend work, part of the larger $46.5 billion allocated for border wall construction in Trump’s signature legislation, the “Big Beautiful Bill.”Sheriff Cleveland thought the talk of security construction was “BS” when he first heard of it.His experience in local and national law enforcement tells him a different story than that framed by CBP that Big Bend is “an area of high illegal entry.”What he calls the “God-given barriers” of steep mountains and valleys around the river and an undeveloped landscape without roads would prevent any vehicle getting to his patch. Yet new vehicle barriers are being planned for Terrell County, part of the total $7 billion scheme for the Big Bend sector of the border that includes the national park and land either side.“I believe in border security … but let’s put a barrier where a barrier makes sense,” he told CNN. “Let’s spend money where we need to spend the money.”Cleveland thinks using technology would be better support for him and other rural areas. He points to a solar-powered radar tower with a relatively small footprint that can scan the landscape and identify humans by their gait, triggering cameras to lock on and feed information to agents. Another option would be drones tracking people and helping responders plan a safe interception amid the rugged terrain, he said.“The biggest problem is the people making the decisions out here for the Big Bend sector have never stepped foot out here.”Cleveland ran for sheriff as a Republican but says he may switch to independent — what he sees as the profligate federal spending on something unnecessary does not mesh with his own fiscal conservatism.He signed a letter being carried around the area by former land commissioner Jerry Patterson, praising Trump for closing the border and asking the administration to consider cheaper and less destructive options for the Big Bend region.A similar approach is being taken by others in Texas.US Sen. John Cornyn wrote to DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin last week urging him to meet with local stakeholders before any more construction proceeds on state or federal property. Some of Mullin’s involvement so far has been to waive another federal law, effectively ending a lawsuit claiming that law was being violated. Land Commissioner Dawn Buckingham was more forthright, sending a cease-and-desist letter warning of possible legal action to Customs and Border Protection after she said a federal contractor was sent to work in the Big Bend Ranch State Park without permission. The accompanying news release was titled “Don’t Tread on Texas.”Gov. Greg Abbott remarked before Trump entered the White House for the first time that he did not want a border wall across the entirety of his state. “There are serpentine regions of the Rio Grande where it would be extremely challenging to build a wall. There are parts like the Big Bend region — we don’t want (to) see a wall in the beautiful Big Bend National Park,” Abbott said in December 2016, as reported by The Associated Press. CNN asked for his current views and was directed to a previous statement from Abbott’s press secretary Andrew Mahaleris: “Rugged, isolated areas like Big Bend are great opportunities to deploy technology to aid in securing the border.”Critics say most statewide elected Republican officials have been too quiet in their condemnation of the border barrier construction projects because they fear the wrath of Trump’s criticism on his signature issue of border security.“The one person who is supposed to stand for Texas right now, our governor, is silent,” resident Jess Bartko said. “What they are doing is actively waging a war against our parks, our public lands, our community and our livelihoods.”On Wednesday, Bartko and about 100 other protesters gathered by the river, whose route gives the area its name and which attracts many of the half-million or so annual visitors to the national park.Tourism is a big deal here — for running the river and watching the night sky. There are worries that both will be impacted. As far as the upheaval, there could be debris in the river, and construction lights from sites and worker camps could pollute some of the darkest sky in the Lower 48, blurring the star-filled views of the cosmos.This week some roads and facilities were closed in the national park because of the construction.Down at the river, beside the entrance to Santa Elena Canyon, one of the “crown jewels” of the park, the demonstrators whooped and hollered, their shouts echoing off the cliff walls as they pledged to keep working to protect Big Bend.“The land remembers, the water remembers, it will remember us and our fight,” Joan Escamilla told her fellow supporters of the national park. “You can bury my heart in the Rio Grande.”The-CNN-Wire™ & © 2026 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.
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