What did we learn from the Great Flood of ’93? Not much, say many.

July 29--ST. LOUIS -- The small town of Valmeyer, Ill., which had hugged the edge of the Mississippi River flood plain for more than 80 years, was essentially wiped off the map -- forced to move to higher ground nearby.

Forty miles to the west, the muddy waters of the Missouri River poured into the Chesterfield Valley, inundating some 250 businesses.

Highway 40 (Interstate 64) was closed temporarily by the massive flood; an estimated 4,000 people locally were without jobs for months.

In the region, thousands of homes were flooded; some were swept away entirely.

Twenty-five years ago this week, one of the worst flooding events in U.S. history paralyzed the St. Louis area and much of the Midwest.

In the aftermath of the devastating Flood of 1993, officials vowed to learn from the disaster and reduce future flood risk.

Yet major floods have struck the area with unusual frequency in the years since -- and some experts say the region is now even more vulnerable.

Setting the stage

The summer of 1993 saw heavy rains follow a nine- or 10-month wet period that saturated the central U.S. and set the stage for months of high and record-breaking flood levels along the region's major waterways, including the Mississippi and Missouri rivers.

"Some forecast points remained above flood stage for as long as five straight months," says an account of the flood from the National Weather Service. In St. Louis, river heights exceeded "the previous flood of record for more than three full weeks," and spent more days above flood stage than in the rest of the city's recorded history combined.

Photo gallery: Looking back at the Flood of '93

The water's months-long siege of sodden riverside towns and levees built to a climax by late July and early August. On July 30, floodwater overran the Chesterfield Valley when the Monarch Chesterfield Levee was breached, and on Aug. 1, the river gauge at St. Louis hit its highest mark in recorded history with a crest of 49.58 feet -- 19.58 feet above flood stage, and more than 6 feet above the next highest level ever recorded.

In all, 20 million acres across nine states were inundated by that summer's flooding, prompting evacuations of about 54,000 people, and leaving around 50,000 homes damaged or destroyed. It led to 50 deaths and, adjusted for inflation, the $36.9 billion in sustained damage made it "the most costly nontropical, inland flood event to affect the United States on record," according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Dan Hanes, a St. Louis University professor who studies flood issues, calls it "a once in a generation event. ... I think it stands out in people's memory because it hit so many places and lasted so long."

The Flood of 1993, though, is notable for more than just the staggering toll it imposed on the region. The disaster provided the public and policymakers with hard-earned lessons about flood risk. But while progress has since been made to curb that risk in some areas, many say that even with a quarter-century of hindsight, the events of 1993 stand out most for critical lessons that have been ignored, and for the area's continued -- if not heightened -- vulnerability to future major floods.

Questions asked at the time of the flood still apply today.

For instance, while aboard Air Force One on his way to visit the flood-ravaged area, President Bill Clinton was asked by the Post-Dispatch how levees and dams along the Upper Mississippi may have contributed to the disaster.

"I guess the candid answer to your question is I don't know," Clinton told the paper. "We really need to look at the extent to which federal policy made it better or made it worse."

Twenty-five years later, those subjects Clinton broached -- along with other questions about flood policy and river management -- are still relevant. In fact, they could be even more urgent, depending on whom you ask.

That's because in the time since, four other flood events -- in 1995, 2013, 2016 and 2017 -- have cracked the list of the 10 highest flood stages recorded at St. Louis.

Those events, and more frequent major downpours consistent with climate change forecasts, have stoked some concern about factors such as flood plain development and the reliance on levees for flood control -- a line of defense that protects certain areas, but that some believe worsens risk elsewhere, by constricting rivers and pushing water higher.

Reassessing flood policy

Just as Clinton had mused to the Post-Dispatch, the 1993 flood sparked a top-down review of flood policy in its aftermath, meant to seize on teachable moments and identify opportunities for improvement. What followed, though, was what many describe as a mixed bag of incremental progress and roads not taken.

Beyond the sheer scale of the flood's devastation, some thought the disaster's high visibility from months of nightly media coverage could help grease the wheels for change.

"It was the CNN flood. ... '93 is the flood that woke us up," said Gen. Gerald Galloway, the former U.S. Army Corps of Engineers official who spearheaded a federally commissioned report that was perhaps the leading assessment of the flood. The report stressed better coordination among local, state and federal actors, and called for restoring more natural connections of rivers and their flood plains -- a suggestion that would require having less development in harm's way.

Galloway and other flood experts point to some positive changes that followed. Buyouts of high-risk, flood plain properties, for example, became more common.

"Before 1993, there were very few buyouts," said Galloway, now a professor of engineering at the University of Maryland. "I think it's 55,000 buyouts since that time."

Beyond the exodus of some individual property owners, communities such as Valmeyer and Rhineland, Mo. -- two of the 75 towns completely inundated by flooding that year -- relocated to higher elevations.

But some say the voluntary buyout system has ultimately been too scattershot to bring sweeping change to at-risk lowlands.

"Right now you only can go to willing sellers, 'cause it's the rules, and that's about the most inefficient way you can do this," said Brad Walker, the newly retired Big Rivers director for the Missouri Coalition for the Environment.

Other areas -- like achieving better-coordinated flood policies across different levels of government -- have fallen woefully short of what Galloway and some others hoped.

Though he "wishes more had been done" to revamp flood governance since 1993, Galloway says certain shortcomings are understandable.

"There's nothing more political than telling someone where they can or can't live," he said. "What we're trying to do is communicate the risk and have people act on it."

'A colossal failure'

Others are more critical when assessing flood policy actions taken -- and not taken -- since 1993.

"I view our current situation as a colossal failure of paying attention to the warnings of 1993," says Bob Criss, a professor in Washington University's Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences who researches flooding.

While buyouts have spared some properties from continued risk, he says that, in many areas, their impact has been offset by flood plain development.

"It seems to me, if anything, it's one home out and 10 more in," Criss said. "We've surrendered huge acreage to the developers."

He and many other critics point to Chesterfield as a chief example.

"Chesterfield Valley was underwater in '93 and there's, I've heard, more than $1 billion of new stuff built there," said Criss, referencing the suburb's acres of new strip malls and shopping outlets.

"That's the poster child of bad and really ignorant development in a flood plain," agreed Walker.

Meanwhile, area levees have been reinforced, raised and newly built over the last 25 years -- changes cheered as vital protective measures by some and viewed as potential amplifiers of flood risk by others. The structure protecting Chesterfield stands higher than it did in '93, while Valley Park, along the Meramec River, welcomed a new levee that has become the focus of recent controversies about its height and potential impact on local flooding.

Concerns about levee impacts on floods in the Mississippi River Basin go back to at least the 1850s, when an engineer named Charles Ellet raised alarm echoed by Criss and others today.

"He basically said you cannot correct with levees the problems that levees, themselves cause," Criss said. "Ellet knew it wasn't going to work. We overbuilt the system and putting more and more stuff in these low-lying areas just aggravates the problem."

In Chesterfield, at least, some tout the levee modifications as crucial investments in local safety and commerce, and say that flood plain development is done responsibly.

"Chesterfield Valley has a substantially better levee system than it did in '93," said David Human, a lawyer with levee and drainage system expertise, and the former executive director of the Monarch Chesterfield Levee District. "If anything is developed within 600 to 1,000 feet of the levee, we send it to the corps, because we don't want anything to affect the protection from the levee."

The Army Corps of Engineers, meanwhile, steadfastly denies that the region's levees worsen flood risk.

"I'll take the easy way out and say floods come from rain. You can't dispute that," Mike Feldmann, chief of programs and project management for the corps' St. Louis District, told a group of environmental journalists last month in Alton.

Even though climate change makes the area more susceptible to extreme rain events, other experts insist that engineered changes to river systems compromise their ability to handle high water. They say not only is there less storage capacity for water in flood plains or wetlands, but that also could be the case as sedimentation fills in dam and river systems upstream.

"The capacity of those reservoirs is decreasing because of that," Hanes said. "It's a problem kind of creeping up on us."

'When,' not 'if'

While people disagree on whether the region is more or less vulnerable to floods, everyone seems to agree on one thing: Looking ahead, another disaster on par with 1993 will happen in just a matter of time.

"It's not an 'if,' it's a 'when,'" said Human. "But the question is when? Is it next year, is it in five years, is it in 500 years? We don't know."

Although he wants property owners to make educated decisions about locating in a flood plain, he thinks building behind Chesterfield's levee designed to withstand a 500-year flood is a safe bet.

"Where isn't there some risk?" Human said. "From a risk standpoint, the likelihood of a New Madrid-type earthquake is at this point greater than a flood event that would exceed the design limits of the Chesterfield levee."

Other flood experts say that -- flawed or not -- our current system is unlikely to change.

Some say that's because flood mitigation is not valued properly.

"We still haven't come to acceptance of the fact that protected and restored flood plain has economic value, one of the primary values being flood reduction," Walker said. "If it had dollar value, a lot of these projects would just not be built."

Decisions about living in flood-prone areas can also be shaped by access to insurance coverage.

"That's a whole different set of questions than just the science of floods," Hanes said.

Plus, meaningful change would take a lot of money -- a tough ask, given tight government budgets. But it would also require a political push that some think is unlikely to reach a critical mass because current flood policy works well enough for the majority of the population.

"The current system works pretty well for most people," said Jonathan Remo, a Southern Illinois University Carbondale professor specializing in flood and river issues. "I think we're doomed to repeat ourselves because there's just not a lot of political will to change the system."

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