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Kansas City Flood
Fri Sep 10, 2004
Listen in RealAudio 
It was a one-two punch that brought Kansas City to its knees 27 years ago this
weekend. When the city woke on the morning of September 12, 1977, six inches of
new rain had soaked into the hilly ground. And later that evening another torrent
parked over the area and dumped six more inches. Twenty-three people were killed in
the flooding that night. Hi, I’m Bryan Yeaton, and this is The Weather Notebook.
Now to help keep such a disaster from recurring, the U.S. Corps of Engineers has
worked since the late 1970s to rebuild the hard hit Brush Creek Channel from the
ground up. First, bulldozers deepened the original shallow creek bed to an average
depth of nine feet. Workers also widened the channel by 20 feet, and built dams and
holding ponds to slacken the pace of run-off in future downpours. While this is making
Brush Creek safer, folks from Kansas City decided to make it prettier, too. The City's
Parks and Recreation Department teamed up with the Corps of Engineers to make the
flood-taming improvements attractive and useful.
With city funding, a paved walk and bike path was built along much of the channel; one
of the holding ponds is a recreation area. And once more, trees and shrubs line the
creek, more than a quarter-century after its massive elm trees were ripped away by the
flood. Human engineering can't prevent every flood, but in Kansas City the Brush
Creek project should help avoid a repeat of that awful night in 1977.
To peruse our entire archive of past shows, check out our website:
www.weathernotebook.org. Our show is produced by the Mount Washington
Observatory, home of the World’s Worst Weather. We are funded by the National
Science Foundation with support from Subaru of America.
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