Heavy Rain Floods Kansas City Area, Prompting Overnight Rescues

Weather|Heavy Rain Floods Kansas City Area, Prompting Overnight Rescues

Heavy rain in the Kansas City, Mo., area inundated neighborhoods and highways on Thursday, prompting nearly two dozen rescues of people stranded in their cars.

More than eight inches of rain fell in some parts of the metropolitan area overnight, meteorologists said.

Firefighters and rescuers waded through water, sometimes up to their waists, to reach cars stuck in floods overnight, said Chief Michael Hopkins, the spokesman for the Kansas City Fire Department, in an interview.

They continued working through the morning even as the rain started to taper off. No injuries or deaths have been reported.

Emergency workers had rescued people from at least 23 vehicles by early morning, he said, and more rescues were expected as the work commute got underway.

Storm drains along Interstate 435, a beltway that encircles most of the Kansas City metropolitan area, were unable to keep up during the deluge, he said, causing the highway to flood. Most of the rescues from vehicles took place at the highway’s 23rd St. exit, he said.

Areas to the west and north of the city were also overrun with heavy rain.

“It is taking place all over the city,” he said of the rescue effort. “Multiple roads tend to get overrun with water.” These included low-lying areas or those near hills, such as the East Bottoms area, the Westport bar and restaurant district, and neighborhoods in Northeast Kansas City.

More than eight inches of rain had fallen in Olathe, Kan., southwest of Kansas City, since 10 p.m. on Wednesday, said Randall Collier, a meteorologist at the Kansas City office of the National Weather Service. The highest total was 9.81 inches, near Gardner Lake, he said.

In Kansas City, the local office of the National Weather Service reported 2.04 inches of rain had already fallen by 6:40 a.m. Thursday. That marked the second consecutive day with more than two inches of rainfall, tying a local record that has occurred only 12 times in the past 137 years.

More than 13,000 customers were without power early on Thursday in the Kansas City area, in both Kansas and Missouri, according to Evergy, a utilities provider.

The rain was part of a slow-moving weather system that has unleashed a series of intense thunderstorms across a broad section of the United States on Thursday, from the Central Plains to the Mid-Atlantic and parts of the Northeast.

Nazaneen Ghaffar contributed reporting.