What the Water Gave Back
Restitution is never clean. It is always worth it.
Justice || Return || Canal || Community
The civil liability settlement was announced in February: a figure financial reporters described with words like “landmark” and “unprecedented,” though those words really mean “the largest number I have personally encountered in this context,” which is not quite the same as either. Three sources, in proportions requiring six months of negotiation: the Ferren Institute’s remaining assets; the Auric Society’s frozen and liquidating assets; and contributions — described as “voluntary remediation payments,” the legal language for money paid by people who did not want to be charged — from four energy company clients and one government. The other two governments and seven energy companies were still in litigation. Partial, imperfect, to be disputed and appealed for years. Also real. Also a beginning. Also the first material acknowledgment by any responsible party that what had been done to the Canal District was wrong and owed restitution.
Mara attended the announcement in the civic hall with Finn and Petra and Seline and Vorn and Renn and Broel, who had come on his own initiative. The community trust’s director — a woman named Yda who had been displaced in the first year of flooding and spent the decade organizing the diaspora into a political force — spoke after the official announcement with the specific controlled emotion of someone who has been fighting a long time and has won something real but not everything: the most common form of victory and the hardest to feel correctly. She said the settlement would fund the rebuilding. That the rebuilding would take the time it took. That the community’s intention was to return — not to what had been, which was gone, but to what could be, which was not yet decided and therefore still possible. She said this without sentimentality. It was enough. More than enough. It was the human version of the formation’s amber light: persistent, steady, generating warmth in the dark, belonging to the people who needed it.