Flood Hazard in Kansas City since 1880

Abstract

Occupance and management of the Blue River floodplain in Kansas City illustrate the intensity of development despite increasing flood hazards. They have led to adoption of structural controls and floodplain regulations, although flood-control measures receive a low priority from the city. Evidence suggests that continued development may limit their effectiveness. T HE purpose of this article is to improve understanding of the relationships among settlement, flood hazards, and flood-control policies in urban areas. The approach here is to explain how a certain portion of the Blue River floodplain in Kansas City, Missouri, was urbanized, to examine responses of decision makers to local flood hazards, and to evaluate the effectiveness of structural controls and managerial practices. We selected the lower Blue River floodplain, because it is intensely developed and is presumably representative of other urban floodplains in the United States (Fig. 1).1 We were fortunate to find archival materials, many of them private, that dated back more than a century to the period when urbanization was initiated on this floodplain. Our analysis begins with a brief description of the physical parameters to facilitate comparisons with other urban floodplains. This type of information often appears in legal documents prepared in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when many American communities mapped their floodplains and assessed flood hazards in order to participate in the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP). The Blue River, a tributary of the Missouri River, drains an area of approximately 272 square miles. The shape of this drainage area is almost rectangular with a maximum length of 30 miles and a maximum width of 12 miles. Surface elevations range from 1,135 feet in the headwaters region * We express our gratitude to Donald Hurlbert, Alan McCoy, and Earl Kane for comments on an early draft of the text. We thank the federal, state, and local officials as well as the personnel at Armco who facilitated our research. ' Gilbert F. White and others, Changes in Urban Occupance of Floodplains in the United States, University of Chicago, Department of Geography Research Paper 57, Chicago, 1958. e DR. DRIEVER is an associate professor of geography at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, Kansas City, Missouri 64110-2499. DR. VAUGHN is an assistant professor of geography at Jacksonville State University, Jacksonville, Alabama 36265. Copyright ? 1988 by the American Geographical Society of New York This content downloaded from 157.55.39.123 on Mon, 18 Jul 2016 05:46:51 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms THE GEOGRAPHICAL REVIEW