“The cost of all insurance, including life insurance, may be rising for residents of Lofton County owing to the county's poor response to life-threatening disasters natural and unnatural … .”
“Now that's never what you want to hear about the place that you live,” Mrs. Melissa Trent said to her husband Sgt. Vincent Trent.
“Yes, but, when you ride through the county as you can – lotta roads didn't make it through Mneme – you understand,” Sgt. Trent said, “because this time it was not like we didn't know what could happen. With Hurricane Justicia, sure: how often does a hurricane affect us this far north? But having seen Justicia, and then canceling all emergency prep for Mneme? I'd consider this place a risk to insure anything in because of the leadership.”
“Chickens, like hundreds of years of them, coming home to roost,” Mrs. Trent said with a sigh.
“Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said the problem about holding anyone down is that you have to stay down there with them,” Sgt. Trent said. “Lofton County holding out on civil rights until 1974 and then doing everything it could up to 2019 to keep access from being truly equalized didn't stop those of us determined to do well from doing well. It just made it so energy wasn't put into infrastructure things that we all need because that wasn't the priority, and so other things were put together to avoid living like it was later than 1974 without thought to how well those things would be holding up by 2020. And then, tornadoes are truly uncommon here, so... .”
Mrs. Trent sighed.
“A lot of policies have to be paid up in Lofton County today,” she said.
“An avoidable tragedy,” Sgt. Trent said, “and then you think of the ones that just got caught out there and were too poor to have insurance.”
“Yeah,” Mrs. Trent said. “Those of us who understand community are going to have to pull together – but then, way more of us understood that there is no safety net and so worked together to get out of the way as much as possible.”
“Yes, proportionally, our casualties are much lower,” Sgt. Trent said. “So, we just keep pulling together, not holding anyone else down, just pulling together. That's why some communities are, in the very long run, more resilient.”