Looking to prevent flood damage, Jefferson County says new development must divert less water
Date Posted: June 18, 2019
Posted In: Discussion,
From St. Louis Post-Dispatch: In Jefferson County, it can be hard to keep straight all the floods from recent years.
“There’s so many of them, I can’t keep up,” said Charles Groeteke, chairman of the county council, discussing past cycles of flood damage and recovery.
The Meramec River hit its two highest crests on record within an 18-month span, from late 2015 to 2017. And this year, Groeteke said some county residents have spent the last few weeks kayaking to their homes on flooded roads, with the Mississippi River reaching its second-highest level on record for the area — the latest in a series of its own major flood events this decade.
“The devastation in their faces was just heartbreaking,” said Renee Reuter, another county council member, describing victims of flooding in late 2015 and early 2016. When near-record flooding struck again less than 18 months later, she said the reaction transformed into “terribly melancholy resignation that you saw in property owners’ faces at that point.”
Looking to prevent future flood damage, county officials have now amended the legal code to reduce the amount of water that new development is allowed to displace. Until now, for instance, structures were allowed to push water elsewhere, as long as the flood impact to other areas was less than one foot, as outlined by Missouri law. But in unincorporated parts of Jefferson County, that limit is now lowered to one inch, based on an amendment to the county’s “flood damage prevention ordinance” signed May 30.
Some hail the move as an example of “the main thing local governments can do to make better flood policy in the region,” according to David Stokes, executive director of the Great Rivers Habitat Alliance, a nonprofit group focused on river management issues.