Recurring flooding has cost Olathe homeowner $15K. Whose fault is it?
Kate Guimbellot worries her home will flood every time it rains.
The Olathe resident moved to Kansas about 18 years ago from Fort Lauderdale, Florida. She and her wife specifically chose Olathe because of the city and the school system, she said.
The couple first moved into a pre-built home until they designed and built their own in the College Meadows neighborhood near College Boulevard and South Woodland Road. They moved into it shortly after Christmas in 2016.
“This is our nest egg,” she said. “We designed and built this home exactly so it could see us through the end of our lives.”
In August 2017, the first flood came.
“We awoke with the first flood in the morning to discover that when we went into our basement, our entire finished basement — which had carpeting — was ankle deep in water,” she said.
She immediately met with Olathe’s stormwater manager, city engineer, and the builders to address the situation. Everyone believed that the water entered through the basement’s window well and the experts recommended raising it by 3 feet.
They filed an insurance claim and paid $2,000 out of pocket.
“But we think, well, that’s the cost of owning a home,” she said.
Her home’s builders reassured her that it would have to be a 200-year historic flood for it to happen again.
But it did happen again. Twice.
In the eight years Guimbellot’s owned her home, she’s seen three floods wreck her basement and create a pond in her backyard. She’s had two engineering assessments conducted on her house, paid about $15,000 out of pocket to add a new drain system, install waterproofing layers and repair the side of her house, but nothing has kept water away.
A third-party engineering report later showed that the stormwater system is inadequately designed and can’t handle the waterflow around Guimbellot’s home.
Olathe city spokesperson Cody Kennedy said that the city engineer signed the plans, but the system did not meet the plans as approved. However, the sewer plans Guimbellot received via a public records request and shared with The Star don’t have the engineer’s signature.
She’s turned to the city for help, but the city claims that it’s the developer who is responsible for the problem.
“I pay $9,000 in taxes every year to make sure that the public services that Olathe offers are taking care of me,” Guimbellot said. “It’s got to be fixed, and whether Olathe does it and then goes after the developer or the city of Olathe makes the developer change it because he misconstrued what was going to happen.”
She’s still looking for a resolution as the days creep closer to summer.
“Floods have always happened in the June, July, August period so we feel like we’re against a ticking time clock,” she said.
To help stir some action, Guimbellot alongside one of her neighbors filed a tort claim against Olathe — a legal procedure for some types of property damage or personal injuries —to attempt to fix the problem.
“I don’t know what the best answer is, but (what) I do know is no homeowner should be at the whim of the stormwater and not be able to sleep every time that there’s a rainstorm,” she said.
Design flaws
Guimbellot has pushed Olathe to fix the stormwater system for years, but the city said it’s not responsible for replacing the stormwater system.
“After construction, the city of Olathe inherits privately designed and constructed stormwater systems for maintenance. The developer maintains the obligation to address the problems created with the stormwater system,” Kennedy said in a statement. “The city retains the right to maintain but not the obligation to fix developer-created problems and determine how those costs are to be allocated.”
Gary Spehar, the private engineer who helped design the system, declined to comment at this time. The developer, Ron Vanlerberg, could not be reached.
The engineering assessments, conducted in 2022 and 2025 by third-party engineering company HNTB, show that her home was built 2.46 feet lower than in city-approved plans and that there were errors in stormwater modeling calculations, Kennedy said.
“These factors have combined to cause greater stormwater impacts on the home than were anticipated by the developer or the homebuilder,” Kennedy said.
The pipe that runs alongside Guimbellot’s house in the greenspace, which takes the water downstream, is a 2-foot wide pipe when it should be almost double that size to handle the amount of stormwater coming through her system, she said.
“That’s the job of every new development is to take the water and send it down the line, and that’s great because down the line can handle it,” Guimbellot said. “The problem is it’s hit this choke point where we’re trying to take that volume of water and put it through (a) straw.”
Gaps in the approval process?
Guimbellot received her home’s street and storm sewer improvement plans via a Kansas Open Records Act request (KORA), which shows that the city engineer’s signature is left blank.
She later requested the signed version of the document, to which the city responded via email: “No records found. Previously document sent is what we have.”
Kennedy said that the plans were signed by the city engineer as required, but the constructed system didn’t meet the plans as signed.
It is tragically underdesigned now,” Guimbellot said. “Regardless of who ends up fixing this system, it’s the city’s responsibility to make it happen.”
That’s why Guimbellot submitted a tort claim, which is meant for types of property damage or personal injuries. Once submitted, a claimant may not take any legal action within 120 days after filing the notice unless the city denies the claim and provides notice before the 120 days expire.
Guimbellot said that tort claims will help the city go after the developer, but tort claims have a $500,000 cap per claim.
“The cost to repair suggested by HNTB was $448,000 three years ago. If it comes back as $650,000. The tort is going to only cover $500,000,” Guimbellot said. “I don’t have high hopes for the tort working out but we don’t want to leave any stone unturned.”
“I’ve done everything I could … I’ve begged, I’ve cajoled, but it’s been exhausting. It’s been a lot of years.”
Neighborhood impacts
Guimbellot isn’t alone in her requests.
Max Cook, her neighbor, joined her tort claim for his home flooding in 2021 — the same year Guimbellot’s home flooded for the second time.
“I woke up the next day and I saw that there was debris over the side of my house,” Cook recalled. “I saw on the back of my house (there was) like a water line about a foot up on the back of my house and I thought that was crazy because … I didn’t think there was any way water would get up that high.”
He later got a call from his wife, who told him that the basement flooded. The damages cost them $5,000 after insurance.
“So when I called the city to say, ‘Hey, your drainage, your storm drainage model didn’t work, they said this was a once-in-a-200-year storm and that’s why the drain model wasn’t able to keep up,” Cook said.
With Kate’s home flooding several times, Cook said that he doesn’t think the city did the proper research for the neighborhood’s storm drainage system.
There were times the creek backed up and pooled, but the water never reached his house as it did in 2021.
“But the system is still too small to handle what goes through there, it shouldn’t be pooling up,” Cook said. “At the time I had little kids, too, so that was a hazard to my kids if it was raining to have a pool on the side of the house.”
Cook’s wife still can’t sleep any time it rains in fear of history repeating itself.
He joined Guimbellot in taking action against the city because he wants to see a solution, too.
“We pay enough in taxes within our neighborhood, especially to have a system that’s not suspect every single time it rains,” he said. “Every solution they’ve offered, Kate has executed to some degree.”
“I’ve done everything they’ve asked me to do on my end, but at the end of the day there’s still a pinhole for a gallon of water to go through.”
This story was originally published May 16, 2025 at 5:00 AM.