Though the patience of many among us is wearing thin, Skagit County communities should continue to work with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers toward a lasting, comprehensive approach to flood protection.

A recent presentation to the Skagit County flood advisory committee by Burlington City Engineer Chal Martin, a corps critic, only reinforced the need for interagency cooperation.

The biggest obstacle to that cooperative approach is the continuing dispute over how much water would flow how high in a 100-year flood. Such an event has a “statistical” 1 percent chance of occurring in any given year. It also is the bar that the Federal Emergency Management Agency sets for federally assisted flood insurance.

There’s the rub.

Martin has argued many times in recent years that the corps’ data on the height of a 100-year flood would make the cost of flood protection so expensive as to impede future development in Burlington.

Burlington, Mount Vernon and Dike District 12 have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars for their hydrological consultants to challenge the corps’ numbers.

It is unlikely that FEMA will accept any data other than the corps’ in its insurance calculations, leaving it to the two cities to persuade the corps to lower its predications on flood heights.

Given the corps’ response to date, that also seems unlikely. The agency’s semi-apologetic statement at a community meeting last month that “doing anything with us is kind of complicated” is anything but an understatement.

Still, that is a fair assessment of the challenge of comprehensive flood-control planning that considers all possible consequences of any specific project.

Martin offered a proposal that was pretty much shorn of complexity — a ring dike around the entire city of Burlington. He did acknowledge, however, that it would likely back water upriver and flood Sedro-Woolley.

Corps officials have already expressed disapproval of that concept and FEMA would be unlikely to accept it as a remedy for the insurance problem.

Martin and his associates in Mount Vernon and the dike district can certainly continue to make their argument for lower flood heights. In the end, river hydrology will be what the corps determines it to be, and we’ll probably have to plan accordingly.

That is if we want federal assistance with the hundreds of millions of dollars it will cost to make any comprehensive flood protection come to pass.

Toward that goal, we must continually remind our congressional delegation that funding for the ongoing corps study of Skagit River hydrology must be there to keep the work on schedule.

• Editorials reflect the consensus opinion of the editorial board and are written by its members: Publisher L. Stedem Wood, Editor Don Nelson and City Editor Dick Clever.