Flood thy neighbor: Who stays dry and who decides?

Fenton. With the course submerged, Wolfner’s father began a tradition that Wolfner continues today: jotting down the height of the Meramec from nearby stream gauges along with its impact on the course. He logged the river’s height in Valley Park at 39.73 feet. Beside it, he wrote, “5 1/2 [feet] water in clubhouse.”

The Corps had orders from Congress to solve the flooding on the Meramec, along with a budget of $20 million, or about $54 million in 2018 dollars. The fix had to be economically sound, Congress said, and it could not include “any dams or reservoirs.”

In a report released in 1987, the Corps outlined plans to protect more than a dozen communities with levees and other solutions — and then discarded all but a few of those plans because their costs outweighed the projected benefits.

The 6-mile riverfront of Fenton was among the places the Corps decided a levee would be too expensive.

In Arnold, the Corps considered buying out low-lying houses and trailer homes — including in the Starling Community Trailer Court, where Sarah Quinn’s grandmother was flooded out in 2015. This proposal also failed the test. The city of 19,000 was the largest in the area and vulnerable on two fronts, from floods rushing down the Meramec and from high water backing up from the Mississippi. The Corps calculated that it could buy out the riskiest homes for $5 million. But the properties weren’t worth enough to justify that, the agency decided.

The process is “always driven by property values, for better or worse,” said Leonard Shabman, a senior fellow at Resources for the Future, a nonprofit research institution, who studies federal cost-benefit formulas. “The analyses that get done may favor those with higher incomes.”

Valley Park had hundreds of homes and valuable public services — its police station, fire station, city hall and schools — in the lowest part of the floodplain. The Corps figured it would be worth protecting them all with an $11.8 million levee.

The Corps recommended two solutions in addition to the levee: a buyout for a low-lying mobile home park in