by David Lamb

Created on: July 07, 2008   Last Updated: December 29, 2010

Mississippi Floods and Fixes and Why St. Louis Lacks the Motivation to Implement Them

Nearly nine feet above flood level, the Mississippi River's crest has come and gone in St. Louis, and human ingenuity, it seems, has outsmarted nature once more, averting sure crisis in the Gateway City and leaving its population largely unharmed. But while tired homeowners return to what very well could have been rubble and try to forget their recent turbulences, they should know this: the permanent solutions which have eluded St. Louis for decades will likely do so again.

In part, a complacent attitude is to blame. Even before Wednesday July 2nd's high watermark, the Convention and Visitors Commission was more concerned with tourism than the long-term safety of its city. According to Donna Andrews, a spokesman of the group, "the message is we are open for business."

Perhaps naive, I can't help but think the second 500 year flood in the past fifteen years may have a more pertinent message: a warning of what's to come, a call to prepare for it, or merely a caution that today's St. Louis and nearby Mississippi are together unsustainable.

Regardless of this disaster's significance, the frequency of such floods indicates a growing problem, and it's no coincidence. Expanding St. Louis suburbs along the Mississippi have bred a vicious cycle, where as nearby cities sprawl outward, they cut into the river's once great flood zone. When the Mississippi's flooding area decreases in size, towns are required to construct levees and dams, which often make the river more sensitive to long periods of intense rain. Ultimately, a narrower Mississippi forces regions upriver to protect their land with higher levees, compounding the area's flood susceptibility.

In 1984, after investigating flood risks within St. Louis' Eastern valley, a St. Louis district investigation reported that housing reconstruction and relocation was economically infeasible. Still, the report relied on the "cost-to-benefit" ratio, a number heavily skewed by the fact that the areas investigated to be fixed were predominantly impoverished, with low-value real estate and little industry.

Two unprecedented floods later, St. Louis municipal governments remained loathe to act in 1996 despite the tens of millions of dollars already spent on disaster relief. But the relief money had no bearing on the feasibility of reconstruction. The vast majority of resource relocationhousing, farming, and industry would be financed by St. Louis;

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