Mayor Heddlesten has long sideburns and a mustache that curls around the corners of his mouth. The day we met, he was wearing his patriotic glasses, emblazoned with the American flag.<\/p>\n
Audio clip of Weinberger: Are your eyeglasses, is it the red, white, and blue? Are they \u2014 oh, wow. They\u2019re magnetic.<\/p>\n
Audio clip of Heddlesten: So, they\u2019re the \u2014 yeah \u2014 the eyeglasses that you can swap out.<\/p>\n
I wanted to meet Mayor Heddlesten to hear about a harrowing stormy night last summer. The rain had started coming down that afternoon.<\/p>\n
Audio clip of Heddlesten: I am hoping to have a nice, relaxing, calm evening and take the edge off, watch some TV, whatever. I had made myself a brandy old-fashioned.<\/p>\n
Anthony soon realized that the rain was coming down pretty hard.<\/p>\n
News clip: Flooding, a high possibility with these storms coming in this afternoon into the evening.<\/p>\n
This was a week after the deadly flash floods in central Texas \u2014 the ones that hit Camp Mystic. Riverdale is also at high risk for floods. It sits at the confluence of two bodies of water, the Mississippi River and Duck Creek.<\/p>\n
Audio clip of Heddlesten: We have more time to prepare on the Mississippi \u2014 usually days, at least, if not weeks, to prepare for whatever\u2019s coming. Duck Creek\u2019s a much flashier stream, so you\u2019ve got hours to figure it out.<\/p>\n
Because Riverdale is such a small town, Anthony serves as mayor only part time. In his day job, he\u2019s a civil engineer for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. And he\u2019s kind of a weather nerd \u2014 he\u2019s got a whole weather station set up at his house.<\/p>\n
[SOUND OF ALARM BEEPING]<\/p>\n
Audio clip of Heddlesten: It sets off an alarm if it gets too high of a rainfall rate. So, it\u2019s going off in the background. All the cues are telling me something\u2019s going to go south here in my evening, right?<\/p>\n
Clip of weather radio: Flash flood warning remains in effect until 9 p.m. this evening for southern Scott and Rock Island Counties.<\/p>\n
Until recently, Mayor Heddlesten had help in situations like these, from the federal government. The feds ran a gauge on Duck Creek \u2014 a little brick house with a sensor inside. It measured the height of the creek and posted the information online. Local officials would use that information to make decisions about evacuations during storms.<\/p>\n
But the mayor no longer had that crucial service at his disposal \u2014 in part because of President Trump and Elon Musk.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Mayor Heddlesten has long sideburns and a mustache that curls around the corners of his mouth. The day…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":216845,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[31897,4174,62819,81268,34199,1452,31482,8060,47837,900,4173,4669,85464,85462,5351,534,9,11,10,27689,65512,83251,85463,85461,1777,1069,901,1876,6524,133],"class_list":["post-216844","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york","tag-american-red-cross","tag-army-corps-of-engineers","tag-audio-neutral-informative","tag-conservation-of-resources","tag-death-and-dying","tag-donald-j","tag-federal-aid-us","tag-federal-emergency-management-agency","tag-federal-state-relations-us","tag-floods","tag-global-warming","tag-government-employees","tag-guadalupe-river-tex","tag-humanitarian-aid","tag-iowa","tag-national-weather-service","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-headlines","tag-new-york-news","tag-rescues","tag-rivers","tag-security-and-warning-systems","tag-sensors","tag-summer-camps","tag-texas","tag-trump","tag-united-states","tag-united-states-politics-and-government","tag-water","tag-weather"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/216844","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=216844"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/216844\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/216845"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=216844"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=216844"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=216844"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}