By KEN CARPENTER
Great Bend Post
GREAT BEND — Forty years ago this week, much of Great Bend was covered with floodwater. The Great Flood of 1981 hit the town on June 15th of that year. Torrential rains, as much as 20 inches in 12 hours, caused flooding at the Dry Walnut Creek in southwestern Barton County.
Bob Suelter, Great Bend City Attorney, recalled some of the effects of the flood.
"A lot of it got in our storm sewers and that backed water up into the basements,” Suelter said. “I had a friend that said that he went down in the basement, and he got all of his drains plugged off. He stuck a tennis ball clear down in the crook of his toilet, and he said he was afraid it would come out. So he sat there, he fell asleep, and he said apparently the pressure built up enough to shoot that tennis ball at him, woke him up in the middle of the night. The water started pouring in, and he just went upstairs and waited to clean it up.”
At its worst, the floodwaters covered about 75 percent of Great Bend and were 6-feet deep in some homes. Appearing on 1590 KVGB’s City Edition this past Wednesday, Suelter remembered how Great Bend residents pitched in to deal with the mess.
"We just cleaned up peoples’ houses,” Suelter remembered. ”There were lines on the walls upstairs on some of them [showing] how high it got. A lot of basements were filled up. People were having to get a mud pump and stick it in the basement and suck all the water out.”
It was estimated that damage exceeded $42 million.
The 1981 flood reopened the controversial debate about building a flood control project to prevent similar flooding in the future. After years of debate, the construction of the project was approved. It was completed about ten years after the flood.