Levees, Work of Thousands Keep Kansas City Dry

The 40-year-old levees met the challenge on Tuesday, holding back the raging Missouri and Kansas rivers and answering the prayers of thousands here who had labored through the night to keep the water out.

Although the Missouri crested at 48.8 feet in the city, the downtown areas remained dry behind the 52-foot-tall flood walls built after the devastating floods of 1951. The Kansas peaked at about 53.5 feet a few miles to the west, but the levees there are 57 feet tall.

And in all but a few areas, the levees--hastily topped with hundreds of thousands of sandbags--did their job.

“It’s close, too close, but it looks like the dike is holding,” Kansas City Fire Chief Charles Fischer said Tuesday afternoon.

The only flooding was in outlying communities to the west and north, where a leak under one levee and a minor breach in another prompted the precautionary evacuation of more than 8,000 people.

Those who elected to stay with their property tended to be newcomers, people who put their faith in the flood walls and the forecasts. Those who cleared out tended to be old-timers, people who remembered the disasters of the past.

“I saw the ’51 flood,” Michael Koska, owner of a fireworks store, said as his warehouse full of pyrotechnic gear was being loaded onto a convoy of trucks headed for higher ground. But Koska’s store and warehouse apparently were spared, as were the businesses and homes of the others who had piled sandbags at their doors, boarded up their windows and hoped for the best during the terrifying hours before the crests had passed.

Engineers said there should be another set of crests a few days from now, when the runoff from thunderstorms that have pounded Nebraska, Kansas and western Iowa begins moving downstream toward the levees that barricade the confluence of the Missouri and Kansas rivers in Kansas City. How high the water will rise then has yet to be predicted.

But before the Missouri crests again here, it will pose renewed threats to the city of St. Joseph, Mo., 50 miles upstream, where 85,000 residents were still without water service on Tuesday after the city’s water treatment plant was flooded by the overflowing river.

As in Kansas City, the river level began dropping in St. Joseph on Tuesday afternoon, but many of the 6,000 residents of St. Joseph’s south side, evacuated earlier as a precaution, had yet to return to their homes.

In the old red brick factories and warehouses of Kansas City’s industrial district, business owners held their collective breath on Tuesday morning as the flood surges from the Missouri and Kansas rivers collided.

The only thing standing between their firms and the rising rivers was a curtain of foot-thick concrete walls built after floodwaters roared through the district like a tidal wave in 1951.

Ignoring pleas from authorities to stay home and keep roads clear, thousands of sightseers gathered on the bluffs of nearby Quality Hill Tuesday morning for a first-hand look at the boiling confluence of the two mighty rivers.

“Geez, it’s like we’re on stage,” said Greg Weld, president of a 26-year-old firm that manufactures racing wheels as he looked up the hill. He was one of the few businessmen who had faith in the walls and operated business-as-usual on Tuesday.

“I’m not a foolhardy optimist, but I prefer to trust the experts, and the information they are giving us,” Weld said as the water continued to rise. “I’m assuming engineers are correct in saying the flood walls will work.”

A block away, sitting on the loading dock of the chemical supply house that has been in his family since 1939, Roger Shores was far from persuaded.

Shores had already moved his most valuable inventory to higher ground and given his employees the day off. Now, he was watching for possible looters while keeping an eye on the containment walls just down the street.

“It’s dumb to be so confident,” he said, pointing up at the high-water mark etched 17 feet above ground on his building during the flood of ’51. “There’s so much misinformation and rumors floating around, the only way to know for certain if we’re going to be flooded again is to be here.”

The waiting ended Tuesday afternoon when the chocolate-colored waters began to recede.

“We’re very grateful,” said Forest Swafford, a spokesman for the Kansas City, Kan., Board of Public Works. “Because of the walls, it’s not as bad as it could have been.”

Standing on a catwalk straddling a section of flood wall in the industrial district, Larry Frevert, chairman of the Kansas City Missouri Levee Committee, smiled and said: “I think somebody had tremendous foresight to build this wall. . . .

“It was designed to withstand a 500-year flood, and I’m sure they paid a financial sacrifice to build it,” he said. “Well, it sure paid off for us today.”

Jay Dillingham, retired president of the Kansas City Stockyards Assn. and one of those who lobbied for federal funds to construct the walls, recalled how “a lot of people thought the country and the Army Corps of Engineers was throwing away a lot of money on them.”

“They thought it was foolishness,” Dillingham said. “This time, both rivers were high and the walls retained them. Amazing. They worked.”

But not everywhere.

Across the state line to the west in Kansas City, Kan., about 8,000 residents of the low-lying Armourdale and Fairfax districts were evacuated when several small leaks developed in the Kansas River levee. Police and National Guardsmen patrolled the deserted streets to prevent looting.

And a few miles northwest of here, most of the 60 residents of the village of Waldron, Mo., were evacuated when officials anticipated a minor break in a levee on the Missouri River. Early Tuesday morning, a 100-foot section of the levee gave way. Officials said three families who chose to stay behind were on higher ground reachable only by boat.

In nearby Hardin, Mo., rising ground water pushed a coffin up out of the ground in the city cemetery.

Another town in the Kansas City area, Lexington, Mo., lost its water service when the rising Missouri seeped into a riverfront water treatment plant Monday night, forcing the facility to shut down. Cindy Dickmeyer, mayor of the city of 54,000, said tanker trucks had begun hauling in potable water and portable toilets were being set up throughout the town. There was no estimate when the plant could be put back in operation.

Up the Missouri River in St. Joseph, residents endured their third day without water under a blistering sun in 93-degree heat. City officials said they hoped water service would be restored by Saturday.

St. Joseph Mayor Glenda Kelly, who was once a resident of San Diego, recalled Southern California’s earthquakes and drew a parallel between the two types of disasters.

“You’re powerless,” she said. “You just cannot control nature. You can do all the preparedness stuff, but in the end Mother Nature will do what she will do.”

Outside St. Joseph’s temporary disaster applications center, hundreds of people lined up to apply for state and federal assistance.

As newly homeless and unemployed residents shuffled between tables dispensing everything from agricultural assistance information to food stamps to crisis counseling, Bill Sanders, a spokesman for the Federal Emergency Management Agency, said Midwesterners often are reluctant to seek the government help in such disasters.

“These people are very self-reliant,” he said. “They have never had to ask the government for anything. “

Two questions remain unanswered: Whether the sodden levees in St. Joseph and Kansas City will start to weaken and what will happen when the surge that passed through the two cities finally gets all the way down the Missouri River to St. Louis. Forecasters are calling for a crest in St. Louis of 48 feet sometime next week, almost a foot higher than last week’s record.

About 50 miles south of St. Louis, officials in Prairie du Rocher, Ill., called in National Guard helicopters Monday night in their battle to plug an unstable string of sand boils that threatened to undermine their 35-mile flood wall along the Mississippi River.

The Illinois Guard helicopters were summoned after engineers determined they could no longer safely deploy emergency workers on foot atop the fragile levee or maneuver flatboats through the shallow, watery ditches behind it.

“We’ve stretched as far as we can,” said levee commissioner Ralph Minton. “It’s out of our hands now.”

For much of Monday night and early Tuesday, the helicopters lowered netted pallets filled with sandbags. By the time the operation was completed, 2,000 sandbags had been delivered, said Village Clerk Loretha Kemmy.

With a projected 48-foot crest due in Prairie du Rocher later this week, at least half of the town’s 650 residents have already moved out. If the flood wall breaks, water is expected to wash over 45,000 acres of farmland.

Those who remain are prepared to go.

“We know it’s inevitable,” Kemmy said. “When it hits 48 feet, we’re done.”

Residents of the town, a historic site where French colonists built a fort in 1722, had been warned over the weekend that a levee break was imminent. Many had evacuated the area twice when false alarms sounded from the local firehouse.

During one of the alarms, officials barged into St. Joseph’s Catholic Church, just before Sunday mass, and urged parishioners to flee.

Artifacts from the French fort have been removed to safety to a brick building across from the wood plank village hall. But village officials say they were uncertain whether the town proper could withstand the flood, despite some protection from a railroad embankment behind the weakening levee.

Sahagun reported from Kansas City, Mo., and Healy reported from St. Joseph, Mo. Times staff writers Stephen Braun in Prairie du Rocher, Ill., Eric Malnic in Los Angeles and Edith Stanley in Alton, Ill., contributed to this story.

* HOUSE PASSES FLOOD AID: The $3-billion measure now goes to the Senate. A13