(C) Daily Yonder - Keep it Rural This story was originally published by Daily Yonder - Keep it Rural and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . A Vantage Point for a Fraying Social Safety Net [1] ['Claire Carlson', 'The Daily Yonder', '.Wp-Block-Co-Authors-Plus-Coauthors.Is-Layout-Flow', 'Class', 'Wp-Block-Co-Authors-Plus', 'Display Inline', '.Wp-Block-Co-Authors-Plus-Avatar', 'Where Img', 'Height Auto Max-Width', 'Vertical-Align Bottom .Wp-Block-Co-Authors-Plus-Coauthors.Is-Layout-Flow .Wp-Block-Co-Authors-Plus-Avatar'] Date: 2025-07-16 Editor’s Note: This post is from our data newsletter, the Rural Index, headed by Sarah Melotte, the Daily Yonder’s data reporter. Subscribe to get a weekly map or graph straight to your inbox. Late one spring evening in 1796, a deep rumble reverberated through the countryside of Sweden’s Jämtland province. It came from Ragundasjön, a 16 mile-long lake whose outlet formed a waterfall so steep and strong it prevented the local logging industry, which transported timber on boats along the nearby river Indalsälven, from passing. For years they portaged the wood around the falls, hiring workers from the villages that dotted the river’s edge to haul the timber on and off the boats. But in the later half of the 1700s, construction began on a bypass canal that would rid them of the need to portage the timber. Construction was slowgoing. The land the canal was built on consisted of silt, sand, and gravel that would fall back into the trench as they dug. After many stops and starts, in 1795 the canal finally reached the lake, connecting Indalsälven to Ragundasjön. Its success was short-lived. The spring of 1796 was unusually wet, and one June night, Ragundasjön began to flood. The canal filled with more water than its ground could absorb, and soon it started to erode, creating a giant outlet for the lake water to flow through. In just four hours, Ragundasjön was empty, the land below it flooded, and the waterfall – the reason for all this canal trouble – completely gone. More than 200 years later, this event is still considered one of Sweden’s most catastrophic natural disasters. Countless salmon died, buildings were destroyed, and the entire geography of this place was reshaped in just one night. Yet not a single person died, which historians say is because people were sleeping in their homes built high above the floodplain. I learned all this while wandering Döda fallet (dead fall), the site of this infamous disaster. Where there was once a roaring whitewater rapid now lie small pools of water between giant boulders. A boardwalk has been built above the ravine to allow visitors to peer down into it, getting a firsthand look at the way this region was transformed by a single flood. Just a few days before I visited Döda fallet, a different flooding event occurred thousands of miles across the Atlantic in Kerr County, Texas. In the early hours of July 4, 2025, the Guadalupe River rose more than 39 feet, completely flooding small communities and recreation areas. Most tragically, a summer camp was flooded, the cabins closest to the river swept away by the raging waters. This is an ongoing disaster: as of July 14, 130 people are confirmed dead and more than 160 are still missing. At least three dozen are children, many of them from the summer camp. It’s likely that the final death toll will reach more than 300 people, an astonishingly high number for a single flood. I scrolled through interviews with survivors from a quiet corner of Sweden. I’d come here for a couple of reasons: the first (and main reason) was because I have many distant relatives who still live in Sweden and Finland, the countries my great-grandparents immigrated from. I wanted to visit both places and see what, if any, of this flat, lake-covered landscape lived in me. I also, as I told some friends a few months prior to my departure to the homeland, wanted to look at America from the outside, my view unobscured by my daily American life. What would a few weeks outside of America tell me about America? There is a tendency, at least among liberals, to idealize Scandinavia, with their free education and health care and robust public transportation system. I’ve always been wary of this tendency, especially given Sweden’s recent immigration crackdown and their use of forced sterilization under a “racial purity program” that was in use until 1976 – less than 50 years ago. This peddling of Scandinavia’s virtues always felt too good to be true. But as I traveled throughout Sweden, Norway, and Finland (which is not technically a Scandinavian but Nordic country, if we’re being exact), things did, in fact, feel pretty good. One cousin told me that after spending three years on a four-year psychology degree, she decided to drop out, work abroad, and then come back to school for a five-year civil engineering degree. This was possible because she had no student loans; both schools she attended were free, allowing her the time to find the career path that best suited her. My other cousin told me about his brother who’d recently had a heart transplant, spending roughly 200 days of 2024 in the hospital. He was flown back and forth by helicopter between the Swedish cities of Stockholm and Lund during his hospitalization. Staying at the hospital cost roughly $20 per night; everything else was free, including the heli ambulance. When I was in Finland, my relatives were just clocking off work and into four and five-week summer vacations, which is the norm and actually required for all salaried employees. Time off of work is considered just as important as time on. All this lies in stark contrast to the way things are in America, where people can sign onto hundreds of thousands of dollars of student loans when they are 18 years old and get a measly 10 days of vacation every year. Good luck getting any affordable health care without insurance; even with it, deductibles can range in the high thousands before insurance covers your services. Debt and workaholism is normal, common, and even encouraged in the United States. When it comes to the weather, Scandinavia is a pretty uneventful place. There aren’t many thunderstorms, ice storms, or tornadoes; there are hardly any earthquakes and no volcanoes to speak of. Certainly it’s getting hotter with climate change and wildfire risk has been growing, but natural disaster-wise, Scandinavia is rather boring. They don’t have to clean up the mess of a disaster every week or month or year, not like in America. In 2024, there were 27 natural disasters that each cost the U.S. government over $1 billion to respond to. Since 1980, there have been 405 disasters that in total cost more than $2.9 trillion. Thousands of people have died in these events, and that number is growing, according to National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration data. These disasters range from drought to tropical cyclones to wildfires. Towns and cities that used to be called “climate havens” – places that were expected to shield residents from the worst effects of climate change – are seeing horrific storms, like Asheville, North Carolina, during Hurricane Helene last fall, a storm that killed more than 200 people. In Sweden, one of its most fatal natural disasters was a landslide in Gothenburg in 1977. Nine people died. The question that kept arising during my conversations abroad was why, if America is so wealthy, it won’t provide free health care or schooling to its citizens. We floated many different theories – a reluctance to implement higher taxes, a culture of individualism, capitalism – but one I kept returning to, a connection I haven’t seen people make often, is the weather. How is a country supposed to spend on its citizens when it has to pay for the cleanup of all these natural disasters? Then again, wouldn’t people be better off during a disaster if they knew their health care would be taken care of or that they wouldn’t go bankrupt from being saddled with so much debt? But even the cost of cleaning up a disaster isn’t an excuse anymore. The Trump administration has stripped the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) that responds to disasters down to its bones, making it nearly impossible for victims to get any sort of federal support. Two days after the Texas floods, nearly two-thirds of victims’ calls to FEMA went unanswered, according to New York Times reporting. The agency had fired hundreds of call center employees who would normally answer the phone, thanks to a directive from homeland security secretary Kristi Noem. There’s a “correlation is not causation” problem with my hypothesis about extreme weather and a difficulty implementing progressive policy. But still it’s worth noting, with all these cost-cutting measures by the federal government, whether the U.S. could take a page from Scandinavia for once. Sure, there may be four months of almost complete darkness in parts of Sweden when the sun is at its lowest on the horizon, but at least their antidepressants are free. 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