I would agree about the risk of living in the area. I spent most of my life living in South Louisiana. Spring floods and hurricanes are a fact of life. Most of the time things work out. Every so often you have to replace some drywall and your flooring. Some unlucky souls lose everything. Every 100 years or so the Big One hits.
I live in the Houston area now. Hurricanes are still an issue. Harvey was a flood of Biblical proportions of a sort. The only way to have prevented the flooding was to have moved Houston out of the way.
If I lived in Durango, it would be because of the railroad. Other's live there because of the scenery. The same scenery in the right conditions could lead to a fire that destroys homes and costs people their lives.
Not to ever make light of people losing their homes, etc. I fully understand the felling of watching water slowly approaching your front or back door and not being able to do anything but pray it stops in time. But things happen. It's just the way it is.
Killing off the railroad would be a devastating blow to the local economy. One that the area won't recover from. People with money who moved there to retire of have vacation homes don't care about that. Everyone else does. Those whose livelihoods are impacted by the railroad need to speak up in its defense.
If you live in South Louisiana, Texas, or Houston, you know the economy rises and falls with the price of a barrel of crude oil. If the oil patch is doing well, so are the restaurants, hotels, pro sports teams, retailers, and everyone else. If the price of oil falls, so does everything else.
People need to take that into account. The Durango Herald might not like the railroad or it might like the paper sales that go with stirring the pot about the railroad. But it won't like the loss of ad revenue that comes with the main economic driver of the region vanishing.
Just my two cents and I doubt if it's worth that much.
There has to be an economic report somewhere that details how much of an economic drive the railroad is for the region.
