Kansas City, Mo. ? With more rain predicted for Missouri and Kansas this weekend – after a wet May that produced damaging floods in both states – National Weather Service forecasters understood worries about this year turning into another 1993.

But so far, they said Friday, that scenario doesn’t appear likely.

“It’ doesn’t even look like it’s going to be as bad as it was three weeks ago,” said Mark O’Malley, a forecaster at the weather service’s Pleasant Hill office.

“We’ve had several days of fairly significant rains across the area,” O’Malley said, “but three weeks ago you would see 5, 6, 7 inches of rain over a large area. In this case, you’re seeing it in localized areas. And upstream, Nebraska and far northwest Missouri haven’t had the same amounts of rain.”

While the Missouri River was likely to rise to flood stage in some areas, O’Malley said, he did not expect any significant breaks in or breaches of large levees maintained by the Army Corps of Engineers.

And in Kansas, which has seen significant flooding in the Salina area this spring, the weather service said the heavy rains were unlikely to pose a larger threat.

“I don’t think it’s going to be anywhere near like ’93,” said meteorological intern Beth Konop.

“It’s been a really wet pattern, with kind of a continuous rain,” said Konop, who works in the service’s Topeka, Kan., office. “But we’ve had a couple of breaks where the ground has had time to dry out. The state has been under drought conditions for the last few years, so this is helping more to alleviate the drought than it is causing a lot of flooding.”

And while rainfall in the northern part of the state eventually feeds into the Missouri River system, O’Malley said, much of the state drains to the south.