Battered by floods, U.S. river communities try new remedies
ARNOLD, Mo. — Hollywood Beach Road was once such prime real estate that the neighborhood had its own airstrip, enabling well-heeled residents to zip back and forth between homes in nearby St. Louis and weekend cottages on the Meramec River in suburban Arnold, Missouri.
Floods eventually took their toll. Nowadays, all that remains of those waterfront dwellings are crumbling concrete foundations amid a tangle of skinny trees and beaver-gnawed stumps. Nature is reclaiming the area — and is welcome to it, local leaders say.
Instead of building levees to keep floodwaters out, Arnold has used federal and local tax dollars to buy out hundreds of homeowners so the landscape could revert to wetlands that soak up overflow waters.
Those wetlands helped the town of 21,000 escape major damage in 2019 when the Mississippi River reached its second-highest level on record. And they reflect a pattern quietly emerging from a growing number of communities that could help the nation’s midsection cope with rivers often surging beyond their banks at this time of year.
Each spring, melting snow in the north and seasonal rains send huge volumes of runoff into waterways that have been heavily armored to protect surrounding land from flooding. This system of levees, dikes and walls usually held up during the last century but is now being over-topped more frequently by heavier storms that scientists link to global warming.
Floods in the Missouri, Mississippi and Arkansas river basins caused $20 billion in damage in 2019, the second-wettest year on record. The National Weather Service forecast moderate to severe problems in 23 states this spring but said last week the risk had declined because of below-normal rainfall in the past two months. Longer term, one government assessment predicts annual flood damage in the Midwest growing by $500 million by 2050.
But the floodplain awaiting this year’s surge is part of a changing picture, altered from just a few decades ago. It is now dotted with more parks, marshes and forests on land surrendered in recent years by communities and individuals. Some experts envision this expanding green patchwork as a promising model for relieving pressure on a river system that can no longer stay in its manmade channels.
“It’s becoming evident that we have to do something different,” said Colin Wellenkamp, executive director of the Mississippi River Cities and Towns Initiative. “That increasingly means shaping our cities around the river instead of shaping the river around our cities.”
To give rivers more room to sprawl, cities are keeping adjacent lands for limited uses such as parks that can flood when rivers rise. A few rural levees have been set back or removed to create wider flow paths. Wetlands have been restored as buffers.
In Arnold, the improvement was evident after last year’s Midwestern floods, said Robert Shockey, police chief and emergency management director. “Instead of 100 homes getting wet, we have a dozen.”
No one suggests replacing levees, dams and walls as a primary means of flood control.
“But they need to be augmented by natural assets,” said Wellenkamp, whose organization represents nearly 100 municipalities.
This approach is gradually catching state and federal policymakers’ attention. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which has built dams and levees since the late 19th Century, is becoming more receptive.