UNIVERSITY CITY, Mo. — July 26 marks two years since record rainfall caused devastating flooding in University City.
Our news crews were on the ground covering the flooding for hours and spoke with many people who were displaced by the rising waters.
The community was touched by Al’lisa Simril and her family, who were forced to flee their home in the dark, barefoot and wearing pajamas, once the water began to rush into their home.
5 On Your Side shared her story on July 26, 2022. Two years later, we caught up with Simril at the same place her life changed forever.
“It doesn’t feel like two years have passed, it feels like it was just yesterday,” Simril said while standing outside her former home on Belrue Avenue.
Two years later, the home stands vacant, a potted plant Simril and her sons left behind can be seen near the front of the home, carried away from the door from the flood waters.
The Simril family had just moved into the home two months before the day of the historic rainfall and flash flooding. As Simril looks at the home in reflection, she said she had just finished moving the last of the family's possessions into the home from a storage unit the day before the flooding.
We first met Simril outside an emergency flood shelter in University City on July 26, 2022, just moments after water filled her new home. She and her three sons were forced to wade to safety in the dark. Making the trek to her mother's home nearby. That day in 2022, she said, “I mean the water came in so fast. There was no time to grab anything."
Simril showed just how high the water rose inside and outside the home. “I was waist deep in it … out of the front door.”
The two walk the same path the family took to safety.
Simril said, “Coming back here, it’s surreal.”
In 2022, our news crew spotted the darkened bricks about two feet up from the bottom of the home, an indication of the water level that day. Two years later, the bricks are dry. But the impression is fresh.
“We’re still healing from it, you know," Simril said.
Simril has multiple sclerosis. Most of her medication and walking equipment was soaked and washed away on the day of the flooding.
One of her canes could be salvaged. She said, “We wound up going in there, and it was still on the floor.”
But, much more is lost forever. Decades of possessions were gone in a matter of minutes, with a long road to rebuild looming ahead.
Simril said it took a while before the family had permanent housing.
“We finally got placed 10 months or 11 months later,” she said.
Community support kept them afloat, with a successful online fundraiser.
Simril said she's incredibly grateful, adding “I couldn’t believe it was that many people that had poured in.”
She said her sons are enrolled in the University City School District, and the district has reached out on multiple occasions to offer help to the family.
After seeing our reporting, a representative from the Multiple Sclerosis Society reached out to our newsroom to connect with Simril and offered help to her and her sons. Simril said the organization assisted in covering the cost of storage and more.
“We were in a hotel for a while and that was a godsend because someone else from the MS Society saw that and they allowed us to stay in the hotel at no charge.”
The emotion comes in waves for the memories her family can never get back.
"The photos," Simril said, tearing up. "That’s the biggest thing. The photos were on the floor, also. Everything else can be replaced, but the photos cannot.”
The trauma tied to the flood lingers. Simril said the entire experience has left its mark on her sons. “Whenever it rains heavily now, we’re all on edge.”
They’re not the only residents who are living with this fear.
Flooding is a persistent problem in University City, one that Robert Criss, a professor emeritus at Washington University and expert in hydrogeology has studied closely for years.
5 On Your Side met Criss near the corner of Wilson and Drexel in University City, the site of a deadly flood in 2008. He said the city's proximity to a major river puts certain areas at high flood risk.
“The River De Peres can rise 10 feet an hour," Criss said, "We have a problem. It’s 43% impervious area. That’s one of the highest anywhere except for a place like Manhattan, which is totally paved over. So, the water has nowhere to go when it rains hard.”
DCriss wrote an extensive report on the flash flooding of July 26, 2022, and helped get flood markers like this one placed across the city with the help of the late Eric Stein.
Criss and 5 On Your Side's Sydney Stallworth stood near a flood marker for the July 2022 flood water levels.
Stallworth pointed out, “This is almost at-- if not above-- my head.”
Fourteen years earlier, in the deadly flood of 2008, the water was about 18 inches lower.
“We had two fatalities about 50 yards north of here,” Criss said.
Since then, the land has been bought out by the federal government and is now a small park and stretch of green space, that still floods with heavy rain.
Through his research on urban flood patterns, Criss helped calibrate University City’s new early warning emergency stem, CODE RED, which launched in 2023.
The system allows city officials, like the fire or police chief, to send out warning notifications to residents in the event of dangerous flooding or other emergencies.
Criss said, “We give people about a half hour of warning-- that’s all you get.”
It's a step in the right direction to help save lives, but Criss said the risk of flood fatalities will persist without land buyouts, and better building strategies. He said the city and federal government officials need to be tougher on enforcing flood zone building restrictions.
“We are probably on track for more intense storms, delivering more water quickly,” he said. “... When we have homes and cars parked and businesses in the wrong place. It’ll be very serious trouble.”