Flood buyouts avoided repeat damage

Many Cape Girardeau residents vividly remember the disasters of 1993 and 1995, when flooding in the Red Star neighborhood forced hundreds to evacuate.

When the waters receded, the flood victims returned home to soggy carpets, moldy walls and warped floorboards. A thick layer of mud covered everything.

A simple fact became obvious: 1993 wasn't the "100-year flood" everyone said it would be. Those kinds of floods were going to be more frequent than anyone imagined. And the only way to escape this kind of damage was through the federal buyout program.

Still, it was a six-year process for Cape Girardeau, using state and federal dollars, to buy 94 houses, four businesses and 16 vacant lots.

But the buyouts happened. As a result, only eight houses in the entire city were affected by flooding this month when the Mississippi River here hit its third-highest crest in history: 45.7 feet. That compares to 151 flooded homes in August 1993, which saw the highest crest in history: 48.5 feet.

Yes, the river was lower during the current flood, and not as many homes would have been damaged anyway. But nobody is denying the buyout's positive effects. City leaders are delighted with the first real test of the program. Even though city employees are forced to maintain buyout properties where homes were demolished, they say it is well worth the investment.

And all but two of the families who took buyouts simply relocated to higher ground in Cape Girardeau.

Other buyouts after the flood of 1993 paid off across the state this month, too. In all, government entities bought 4,382 parcels of land in Missouri for $99 million.

In 1993, it took thousands of sandbaggers and hundreds of National Guard troops with bulldozers to save historic Ste. Genevieve. This year, a $41 million levee protected the town.

Those sums are mind-boggling, but spending them once means avoiding repeat expenditures -- and heartache and backbreaking labor -- in the future.

Of course, not everybody is excited about the buyouts.

The little town of Commerce, Mo., in Scott County was virtually eliminated through the buyout program. Twenty-one of the 31 families who took the buyout deal after 1996 left the town.

Mayor Lawrence Vetter said "the buyout ruined it." Other Commerce residents note that they don't have neighbors anymore.

The sentiments are understandable, but there are limits to how much the federal government can be expected to do in terms of levees and flood insurance payments decade after decade.

The federal buyout program is a solid one, and those who took advantage of it made the right choice. The evidence presented in this month's flood couldn't be stronger.