Valmeyer

A village that picked itself up off the floodplain and moved uphill

Old Valmeyer stood in the American Bottom, the Mississippi floodplain of southwestern Illinois, three miles from the main channel of the river. It had flooded again and again since its incorporation in 1909, and each time it cleaned up and carried on. In the summer of 1993 the swollen river topped the levees twice in a month. Water up to 16 feet deep lingered for months and damaged some 90 percent of the buildings. Dennis Knobloch, the mayor, surveyed it by helicopter and said it was like flying over the ocean, with only the tips of the houses showing.

FEMA brought the idea, under a recently established hazard mitigation programme: the government would buy out damaged properties and residents could use the money to rebuild on higher ground. Knobloch and other officials thought it crazy at first. Only a handful of towns had made it work, and none on that scale. As the damage mounted the town came round, and in September nearly 70 percent voted to move.

They chose a 500-acre parcel of cornfields and woods on the bluffs about two miles east, more than 300 feet above the floodplain. Residents formed committees to plan the new town with outside experts and put their own savings into down payments on plots so the village could buy the land, and construction began in mid-December 1993, three months after the vote. Moving the town cost about $22 million and buying out the houses about $23 million, with state and federal governments pledging 90 percent of the funding. There were setbacks. Archaeological sites turned up during excavation, a cluster of sinkholes forced changes to the plan, and work stopped for four months when trees on the site proved to be breeding ground for an endangered bat. Roughly 700 of the 900 residents moved, and the whole relocation took about four years, less than half of what federal officials had forecast.

New Valmeyer has gently curving concrete streets, a post office, a school, a gas station, two banks, three churches and a restaurant, and it counted 1,233 people at the 2020 census. The commercial district never developed as hoped; many businesses that closed for the flood moved to neighbouring towns and never came back. Down on the floodplain, where floodplain rules bar new homes, roads have faded to gravel strips and a dozen families still live among the corn and soybeans. Residents return to the old site for the Fourth of July. Officials say communities across the US, and groups from as far away as Japan and Australia, come to learn how Valmeyer did it.