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Post date: Aug 24, 2012 2:36:47 AM
Taxpayers are understandably concerned when they note that Kane Elementary flooded back in 1986. Does it make sense to add on to that building?
The good news is that Kane, like the proposed Early Childhood Center to replace the old portables, does NOT lie in the 100-year floodplain. The school is sited in the 500-year flood plain, so its chance of flooding in a given year is only 0.2%. In other words, Kane is likely to flood only once every 500 years. Even historic Central Middle School is only 95 years old.
Kane was built in 1985 and, as fate would have it, 1986 brought the record flood which inundated about 10% of the city. Even that flood only did $40,318 worth of damage to the multimillion dollar school. That ratio of facility cost to damage repair cost explains why it does not make sense to abandon Kane and build a new school elsewhere. It would not be a responsible use of taxpayer funds to invest millions of dollars to build a new school to avoid a once-every-500-years flooding bill that is only a tiny fraction of that amount.
It also is not cost effective to try and move the PreK and Kindergarten children attending Kane to a different location. The school is sited to serve the children living between the Caney River and the railroad tracks and splitting it into two sites would incur the high overhead costs of building, maintaining, and staffing another facility. Finding another site to serve schoolchildren living between the Caney River and the railroad tracks would also be problematic, likely requiring eminent domain to force the purchase of multiple existing properties to be cleared for a new school.
Patrons have supported adding onto this facility before: the 1993 bond issue added a classroom to Kane, only seven years after the flood.
In the end, the most fiscally conservative approach is to add on to Kane, since the portables will be unusable within a decade, and expect that it will serve the children in its area for decades with no flooding from the Caney River.
How many times has Kane flooded?
The Caney River has only flooded Kane Elementary once, in the record 500-year-flood of 1986, and odds are it will only flood once every 500 years.
Some may recall water damage at Kane more recently. In late April 2007 a six-inch sprinkler pipe under the building burst and caused water damage. Classes were relocated to area churches for a couple of weeks until the building was cleaned up, and over the next few months the water damage was remediated. So the second "flood" of Kane had nothing to do with its location near the Caney River.
Why was Kane built in its location?
Bartlesville underwent massive consolidations of old small elementary schools into larger ones in the mid-1980s. But when the elementary schools for the area now served by Kane were to be consolidated, none of them had a large enough site to become a larger and more efficient school to serve children living between the Caney River and the railroad tracks. There are few large undeveloped tracts of land in that area of town which are not deep in the Caney River floodplain.
The district had for years owned "Shawnee Field" and the portion of the parcel OUTSIDE of the 100-year floodplain was used for the new larger school.
Click the image below to see the Kane attendance boundary.
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