["During the 20th century, floods were the number-one natural disaster in the United States in terms of number of lives lost and property damage. They can occur at any time of the year, in any part of the country, and at any time of the day or night. Most lives are lost when people are swept away by flood currents, whereas most property damage results from inundation by sediment-laden water. Flood currents also possess tremendous destructive power, as lateral forces can demolish buildings and erosion can undermine bridge foundations and footings leading to the collapse of structures."

The USGS map above locates thirty-two of the most significant American floods of the 20th century, from the horrific inundation of Galveston during the Hurricane of 1900 (the deadliest natural disaster ever to strike the United States) to regional floods that struck across the United States in the nineties.  These floods are classified by cause, ranging from the most common -- regional floods caused by heavy precipitation over a sustained period of time -- to flash floods, storm-surge floods, dam- and levee-failure floods, and, rarest of all, ice-jam and mudflow floods.]

Just a century ago, however, windmills by the hundreds of thousands dotted many of the same landscapes where their present-day descendants now loom. Nearly every farmyard had its own spindly device atop a steel tower, pumping water and powering lamps. Those windmills, in their time, stood for the settlers’ proud dominion over nature, for their self-sufficiency and for the Yankee ingenuity that produced something from nothing, literally from thin air. Dozens of manufacturers competed for customers, hawking machines whose brand names formed a kind of American poetry: Buckeye, Climax, Daisy, Dandy, OK, Tip Top, Whizz.

… I wonder whether the turbines of our own century may come to stand for newer forms of self-sufficiency, less individual than national. Rising from the land in shapes as gracile as Brancusi sculptures, they seem to inhabit a middle ground between technology and nature — perfect emblems, perhaps, of a conflicted culture that cherishes its iPhones and organic gardens in equal measure. Maybe, too, they will still stand for the old American dream of snatching something from thin air: a future without sacrifice, and liberty as boundless as the sky.

Goodheart’s piece is accompanied by a few photographs from Mitch Epstein’s forthcoming American Power, which “examines how energy is produced and used in the American landscape.”