With Social Security checks as their only income, 76-year-old Loman Lathrom and his wife often feed themselves for days on fish they’ve caught themselves.

But usually the couple must leave their North Lawrence home to wet a line. On Saturday, after Mother Nature dumped 4 inches of rain in four hours, there would have been no need.

“Saturday their house looked like a houseboat,” said Ted Boyle, president of the North Lawrence Improvement Assn. and a friend of the couple.

Lathrom estimated there was nearly 4 feet of water at the intersection of North Seventh and Lincoln streets, just north of his home. About an inch of water covered the entire floor of his house, ruining the carpet and creating an explosion of mold on the walls and furniture.

“I’m very stressed out,” said Estalene Lathrom, the 71-year-old wife of Loman. “You just sit here and watch the water come in and you ask yourself ‘what can you do?’ We can’t live like this.”

Loman Lathrom doesn’t know how much damage the home, which is uninsured, suffered. But he’s pretty sure it will be at least $1,000 to replace the carpet and clean the house to remove the musty smell.

North Lawrence resident Loman Lathrom, 76, left, makes his way through his home with North Lawrence Improvement Assn. president Ted Boyle Thursday afternoon. Lathrom's home was flooded by the recent rains, and he hopes the city will help pay for replacing his carpet and other flood-damaged areas of the home.

Flooding getting worse

The waterlogged home, which the couple continues to live in, represents a real problem for the Lathroms. But Boyle said the house also is a sign of a problem for all North Lawrence. Specifically, it is evidence that North Lawrence’s long-known flooding problem is getting worse, despite several city projects attempting to control stormwater, he said.

“He never used to have this problem four or five years ago,” Boyle said. “But with all the development happening in the area, it has displaced a lot of water.”

Boyle said Lathrom’s area usually didn’t flood this much unless there were 7 inches to 8 inches of rain in a short period of time. But he equated each new house or development in the area to throwing a rock into a pond. It causes the water level to rise by replacing water-absorbing soil with impervious surfaces such as driveways, sidewalks and rooftops.

City leaders aren’t ready to concede that North Lawrence’s flooding situation is getting worse. But they quickly acknowledge the area has a lot of flooding problems with few easy answers.

“A lot of North Lawrence is in the floodplain, and that is a lot of the problem,” City Manager Mike Wildgen said.

New study

The city is expecting a $280,000 drainage study report of North Lawrence to be completed and ready for city commission review by the end of this year. But Chad Voigt, the city’s stormwater engineer, said its findings won’t be easy to swallow.

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“It only takes money is what it comes down to,” Voigt said.

It likely will take far more money than the city is used to spending for stormwater projects. For example, Boyle said he would like the area near the Lathrom’s home to have a large retention pond and pump station to hold the water and pump it to the Kansas River.

Voigt said that may be a possibility, but said it would only address flooding issues in about 1/12th of the North Lawrence area. He said costs for such a project could be upwards of $15 million. To put that into perspective, the city has spent a total of $17 million over a 10-year period to build approximately 40 stormwater projects throughout the city.

“We’re not going to be able to build everything (that the report identifies,)” Voigt said. “The problem with North Lawrence is that the problems are uniform. There isn’t any area that doesn’t have a problem.

“The issue is how do you prioritize what you can do in North Lawrence, and then those projects have to be prioritized against every other project in the city.”

Density issues

That’s why Voigt said he thought much of the efforts to keep North Lawrence dry needed to focus on development policies that ensure the flooding problems don’t become worse. The study is looking at predicted future land uses for the area. Boyle has said he hopes the study will recommend that new housing development be limited to two to three living units per acre, which would be down from a norm of five to six units per acre.

Voigt said that was one possibility, or he said development could be allowed at normal density levels but only in specified areas. Other parts of North Lawrence would be declared unbuildable. Both options, he said, likely would create much debate in the development community but were needed to be fair to North Lawrence residents.

“Most people who live in North Lawrence know what to expect with flooding, but when you allow more development in North Lawrence, it changes the game on them,” Voigt said.

Loman Lathrom definitely doesn’t like the game these days. He said he either wants the city to build a major improvement that would stop large-scale flooding or buy out his property, which the city has done in some flood-prone spots.

“Right now, I feel like the city isn’t concerned about me one bit,” Lathrom said.