"SITE CHARACTERIZATION" APPLIED TO CAUSE-AND-EFFECT MITIGATION OF RECURRENT FLOODING

Greater Kansas City is subject to recurrent, high-damage urban flooding along two floodplain areas of Turkey Creek, a topographically restricted historic western railway passageway.

Floodplain morphology of the Rosedale and Southwest Boulevard areas of Kansas City, Kansas, have suffered more than 30 millions of dollars of post-1992 standing-water flood damage on a strikingly repetitive basis. Flood waters are cast out of the historic channel by hydraulic malfunction of two underfit historic railway bridges installed in the year 1909. There is no evidence that the bridges were designed to meet a rational flood threat and the current owner of the bridges refuses to modify the hydraulic sections to accommodate modern flood waters. Litigation has arisen over the key flood year of 1993, as well as recurrent out-of-channel flooding by Turkey Creek waters made to leave the channel at the two ancient underfit bridges.

Site Characterization was utilized to gather photographic and video evidence of out-of-channel flood diversion conditions at and immediately around the bridge sites as representing direct cause-and-effect relationships. Combined evidence of cause-and-effect has been time-and-place combined into a computer-graphic simulation of the author’s opinions as to the causative role of the old bridges in creating the subject flood damage.