Flood thy neighbor: Who stays dry and who decides?

officials to provide a levee or some other protection for communities along the Meramec. And at least one resident wasted no time assigning blame. A hand-lettered sign outside a flooded home read, “Thanks for the water, Valley Park.”

The record floods in 2015 and 2017 only fed the suspicions in neighboring towns. Was the levee to blame? The Corps defended its work with a fact sheet citing its calculations from 1993, but no new data.

“The levee does not increase flood heights anywhere downstream of Valley Park,” the agency declared.

In fact, the Corps isn’t sure of the levee’s effect. John Boeckmann, the Corps engineer, said development in the area makes it hard to assess.

“It’s really hard to isolate the effects of a single item,” he said. “So much has changed.”

Checking the agency’s estimates against the levee’s actual impact would require additional funding from Congress, likely hundreds of thousands of dollars for a detailed model. And there’s a question of fairness, Boeckmann said: If one community got a special study, every other flooded town near a levee would want one, too. The St. Louis District alone has more than 70 levees, so the costs soon would add up to millions of dollars.

Jonathan Remo, a professor at Southern Illinois University who’s spent his career studying Midwestern floods, said the Corps has no incentive to verify whether its original flooding predictions still hold. Scientifically speaking, it’s a good idea to check those numbers, given how modeling software and local conditions have changed since 1993, he said. Such a study could even help the Corps make better predictions.

But there are built-in disincentives for the Corps to prove its own work was wrong, Remo said. If the Corps found that the water levels have risen more than it estimated, it wouldn’t just make the agency look bad, he said. It could expose the agency to litigation.

Anne Jefferson, a geology professor at Kent State University, said it all comes down to funding priorities.

“There’s a lot of money to build things,” she said,