When you think about Kansas and natural disasters, you naturally think about tornadoes, or droughts, or maybe blizzards. But did you know that the state’s worst natural disaster came from an epic July 1951 flood?
Heavy storms plagued Kansas between the 9th and 13th dumping as much as seventeen inches of rain across Kansas. But the rains had been coming for at least two and one-half months across eastern Kansas and western Missouri. Many places picked up three times their normal rainfall in June and a year’s worth of rain in just 2 ½ months. When the additional heavy rains came in July, the ground was saturated and there was no where for the water to go.
By the 12th, the dikes around the north end of Topeka had been breached and up to fifteen feet of water from the Kaw River covered that part of the city, hardest hit by the flooding. Hundreds of passengers on the crack Santa Fe Railroad passenger train El Capitan were stranded at Emporia. Three fourths of the town of Salina was underwater.
Preparations for major flooding in the Kansas City area were frantic. People were being evacuated from the Armourdale Industrial District as a levee broke, sending waters from the Kansas River pouring into the area. Fires broke out from oil tanks and runaway barges at the Hannibal Bridge. The river’s flow at Kansas City was sufficient to have supplied the city’s water needs for an entire year in just 6 hours. Flooding in 1993 would be higher, but there were less flood controls in place in 1951, so damage was greater then. The 1951 flood was the worst in U.S. history up to that time, with $1 billion in damage.
