Floods

Strings of colored lights have been going up on the Country Club Plaza in preparation for the annual Evergy Plaza Lighting Ceremony, and on Thanksgiving night, the holiday season will officially get underway with the flip of a switch. Seasonal traditions on the Plaza are a cornerstone of Kansas City culture; without them, the city wouldn’t be the same. After reading our recent 1951 flood story, a reader thought about what it would mean if a flood hit the shopping district. She asked “What’s Your KCQ?,” a collaboration between The Star and the Kansas City Public Library, about the 1977 flood that damaged the Plaza and other parts of town.

Seventy years ago this month, Kansas City was hit with a natural disaster that reverberates to this day – resurfacing in a recent query to “What’s Your KCQ?”: “What happened during the 1951 Flood?” Flooding in the area began the evening of July 12 and worsened the following day, wreaking such destruction that July 13, 1951, became known as Black Friday. But the catastrophe was two months in the making. From May through July, monthly rainfall totals in Kansas and Missouri were three to four times higher than usual. Locals joked about building arks, because in some areas it had literally rained for 40 days and 40 nights. Between July 9 and July 13 alone, parts of the Kansas River basin received 18.5 inches. Unable to absorb any more water, the Kaw began to overflow.