This epilogue highlights efforts to dissuade people from building or rebuilding in the vicinity of the Susquehanna River, as well as efforts to buy out private homes and businesses located in persistent flood zones. Changes in the policy toward the Susquehanna River began after the first decade of the twenty-first century. Following Tropical Storm Lee in 2011, neither the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers nor the state of Pennsylvania showed interest in adding to or creating new flood walls along the Susquehanna River, the policy that had been preferred in the twentieth century. Instead, the state obtained grants from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), which it used to purchase houses and businesses in the Wyoming Valley. Hundreds of people, tired of the perpetual flooding, sold their homes to the local government, which then cleared them off the floodplain and began to restore the river and floodplain to a natural state. The chapter then considers the even more radical idea of removing existing levees and dams along the Susquehanna.
Flux of nitrogen, phosphorus, and suspended sediment from the Susquehanna River Basin to the Chesapeake Bay during Tropical Storm Lee, September 2011, as an indicator of the effects of reservoir sedimentation on water quality
