Grand Tower, IL. Home to 585 people. Sits on a Mississippi floodplain. Dead in the middle of a "seismic zone."

As Time's Steven Gray reports, it's the "unluckiest little town in America." And it may be swept away by the flood waters on Monday:

This tiny town on Illinois's southern tip is caught between catastrophes, literally. A dispute with the Federal Government has resulted in its loss of flood insurance — unless the impoverished town takes expensive measures, like hoisting homes and the few remaining businesses on stilts a dozen feet into the air. But if they scratch together the money to do so, it will be impossible to afford earthquake insurance, which is already prohibitively expensive.

Now Grand Tower residents are anxiously watching the surrounding rivers.

While the crest prediction in the area dropped from 43 feet to 41.5 yesterday, that's still 10 feet about flood level. Like many in the patchwork of levees along the Mississippi, the town's flood wall is very weak. More from Gray's article:

On a recent humid afternoon, Jack "Whitey" Knupp stood atop Grand Tower's levee, surveying the Mississippi. The portly 73-year-old with ruddy cheeks and a shock of silver hair spent much of his life steering barges along the river. Indeed, for years, the river produced the drama in this town's life. Pirates escaping the colonial Spaniards were among the area's first residents. Legend has it that Mark Twain frequently landed here to unload freight. Many of Grand Tower's sons took to the river's barges, hoping to escape into a relatively middle-class existence, and glimpse life beyond the Midwest. Few, however, returned. Last month Knupp opened the modest Mississippi River Museum in an abandoned 1890s Main Street doctor's office here to try to preserve that colorful past. But the river may well be the very thing that causes Grand Tower's undoing.

Read the whole thing here.