Rain of Fear In Kansas City

Cry from the rooftops: "Here we are--help us!"

"There were two Cadillacs parked here, and all of a sudden they just floated down the street," recounted Mike Collard, a cook at the Plaza III restaurant. Barber Gene Katzman heard "people hollering from rooftops, 'Here we are --help us!' Kids were scared and crying. The people were panicked."

Kansas City was inundated by more than 12 in. of rain in 24 hours. When the storm--actually two downpours interrupted by an afternoon of sunshine --struck early last week, the area's normally placid creeks and drainage ditches were no match for it. A wall of water crashed through the center of town.

"It was 15 to 20 ft. higher than anything anybody had ever seen," said Davis Jackson, head of the Country Club Plaza, the sprawling downtown hotel and shopping complex. "No one had ever thought they would live long enough to see it." When the flood receded hours later, 24 were dead, 1,200 were homeless, and damage was estimated at $50 million.

City Manager Robert Kipp called the event "disastrous beyond description." Marveled Deputy Fire Chief Bennie Imperiale: "In all my born days, in all my experience on the job, I haven't seen anything like this." Hardest hit was the Country Club Plaza area, developed in 1922 as the nation's first planned shopping center. There the floodwaters smashed storefronts and swept cars along like toys. At the Plaza III, flooded with 5 ft. of water in 14 minutes, the bartender escaped the onrushing tide by ducking behind his bar. As he ran for the street, the glass wall behind the bar collapsed. By the time he found his wife at the nearby restaurant where she worked as a waitress, their new car was gone--washed away into the creek bed.

On the Swope Parkway two women on the way to pick up their husbands at the Armco Steel plant took refuge on top of their car. But it overturned after being battered by abandoned floating cars and the torrents of water; one woman was rescued by six men who formed a human chain to pull her to safety, but her sister-in-law drowned. The 23 other dead were found, said one reporter, "all over the place."

A natural-gas leak led to an explosion and fire that wiped out three stores and damaged three others. At the Alameda Plaza Hotel, President Philip Pistilli grieved, "It's catastrophic--the bakeshops, our production kitchens, ballroom, six meeting rooms, food storage areas, all gone." Across the state line in Overland Park, Kans., nearly 35% of the homes were affected by the deluge.

Electricity was cut off for 25,000 utility customers, and 16,000 phones were knocked out. Those services resumed within 48 hours, but the cleanup would take longer. Miller Nichols, whose father developed Country Club Plaza, slogged through the area in high rubber boots and pledged, "We're gonna bounce back. By Thanksgiving you'll hardly know that anything happened."

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