Water Damage Restoration in Kansas City, MO

Kansas City's water damage environment is shaped by its position at the confluence of the Missouri and Kansas Rivers in the heart of the continent's most active severe weather corridor, where intense convective storms can deliver several inches of rain in under an hour to an urban watershed with limited natural infiltration capacity. The city's Blue River and Brush Creek — urban waterways that drain large portions of Kansas City before entering the Missouri River — have long histories of catastrophic flash flooding. The Country Club Plaza, one of the nation's first outdoor shopping districts built along Brush Creek, flooded catastrophically in 1977 when 6 inches of rain in 4 hours raised the creek 25 feet in less than an hour, killing 25 people and causing $80 million in damage. While the Brush Creek channel has since been improved with flood-control modifications, the creek still overtops its banks in extreme rainfall events and floods the Plaza parking structures and adjacent Armour Boulevard properties. Kansas City's clay-heavy soils — predominantly Sharpsburg and Grundy silty clay loams — have among the lowest permeability values of any major metro, meaning that even moderate rainfall events of 1 to 2 inches generate immediate surface runoff that overwhelms street drainage throughout the metro.