Not too long ago, I saw this quote from a spokesman for the Federal Emergency Management

Agency that made me sit up and pay attention. It was about the massive floods that swept through

Montana in mid-June and the people whose homes had been damaged or destroyed. He said it really well

here where he says, I always tell people this is a tough line to tell

people take responsibility for your own disaster recovery.

That's Ashley Nurbivig, a senior political reporter for MTN News in Montana.

She's been covering the floods and the communities where people were told not to wait on the

federal government to come save them.

Maybe at some point you will get money back from us, but it won't make you whole,

which I think is like a very sensible approach from a spokesperson perspective.

But then it goes back to the policymakers of, okay, so what are we saying to these people who

had no reason to think that their homes were going to get flooded, that this is on them, sort of?

Those people whose homes flooded, many of them didn't have flood insurance, largely because where they live is outside the regular floodplain, they didn't think they needed it.

But with climate change, that map is shifting.

We had a once in every 500-year flood in some areas based on the floodplains. It was like a once-in-a-thousand-a-thousand-year

flooding. Basically, we had a really heavy snowpack that hadn't melted off as much as we expected, followed by a bunch of rain.

And so the rivers just got really high, really fast.

There's still like some conversations about like how much we should have known, but took out a ton of bridges in south central Montana.

And, you know, what most people will be familiar with is it took out a lot of roads

into Yellowstone Park. Tonight, residents are still drying out. Cell phone video shows two kids

using a raft to gather belongings in their basement filled with several feet of water. From the air,

the scope of the damage becomes clear, chocolate brown water still flowing

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