Flood thy neighbor: Who stays dry and who decides?

wild cards such as additional development and climate change that often exacerbate flooding. After building the levee, the Corps never measured its actual impact.

Residents in Arnold, Fenton and Pacific weren’t just frustrated that they suffered repeated floods while Valley Park stayed dry. They blamed the levee for making the flooding worse.

Their accusations echo claims from residents near other levees: A 2011 flood along Pennsylvania’s Susquehanna River raised suspicions that a levee had pushed water into unprotected communities. In Louisiana, engineering consultants projected that a proposed levee extension would raise flooding by about an inch, but local reporters uncovered another study that predicted up to 8 inches — a finding that prompted a lawsuit. And a recent paper found levees have aggravated major floods on the Lower Mississippi River.

People across the Meramec basin can only watch and wonder. Sitting in his new clubhouse, which he’s rebuilt twice since 2016, Wolfner peers out at the river and stews about the unfairness of it all. Besides the levee, what does Valley Park have that Fenton doesn’t?

The Corps “could have bought out everybody in that area for that kind of money and never built the levee and not hurt all these people, not hurt guys like me,” he said.

“Let the water go where it’s supposed to go.”

“Seldom Economically Justified”
The Army Corps of Engineers has a huge, complex job — reducing flood risk across the nation’s rivers and coasts and a requirement to do it in a way that benefits the country economically. To prioritize its resources, the Corps uses cost-benefit calculations.

In practice, those formulas determine who gets flooded and who gets saved.

They’re intended to bring some dispassionate reason to a contentious process. But the calculations favor highly valued property over less affluent communities. And the Corps has favored levee-building over nonstructural fixes such as buying out homes to create space for the river to spread out during a flood — practices that many experts say are more effective