Local officials oppose “unacceptable” levee ratings
businesses and residents to buy millions of dollars in flood insurance.
“You’re going to stop a lot of growth, and you’re going to hurt a lot of residents and businesses,” said Bill Mixon, an insurance agent in East St. Louis who recommends his clients purchase flood insurance, but is against a mandatory requirement.
In addition, being rated as an unacceptable levee would mean that if problems are not fixed and the system becomes damaged in a future flood, the federal government is not obligated to pay for its repairs.
Similar criticism has played out across the country as the Corps has stepped up its periodic inspections of the nation’s flood control systems thanks to stimulus money. The Corps also has plans to release reports on the nation’s non-federal levees as well.
Furthermore the Corps hopes to begin an ambitious plan to bolster existing levees so that they can withstand a massive flood that only has a 1-in-500 chance of occurring.
Meanwhile local governments, many struggling financially already, have had difficulty complying with the regulations that require levees to be able to withstand a flood with a 1-in-100 chance of occurring.
“They are making projects that are already onerous impossible to do,” Sterman said. “It’s impossible to get decisions made and get the project done.”
To help pay for levee repairs, three counties in the Metro East Region, which include East St. Louis, passed a local sales tax in 2009 to raise the $150 million needed for flood prevention projects
According to Sterman, all together, with the cost of conducting reviews and creating reports, levee upgrades would cost roughly $500,000, an amount that is unattainable through local financing.
“They say, ‘Do it like the corps does it, and it will be fine,’ ” Sterman said. “We don’t want to do it like the corps does it, because it will never be done. All we are asking is that the corps get out of our way.”
In contrast, Colonel Hall said the St. Louis levees are plagued with structural problems due to its age.
At forty to sixty years of age, the existing levees are no longer viable, even with efforts to maintain them. David R. Busse, the chief of the engineering and construction division for the St. Louis district of the corps, said as a result of an enormous flood in 1993 which inundated nearby Alton, water seeped below many of Metro East levee’s and carved out channels that allowed water from future floods to create “underseepage,” a phenomenon that eventually causes levees to fail.
With every new flood since 1993, “we are seeing the underseepage sooner than what we had before,” Busse said.
Other problems included fist-sized corrosion holes in steel gates used to close off openings in flood walls, antiquated pump stations that had fallen into disrepair, and collapsed drainage culverts.
