Olathe home floods fourth time in 8 years. Owners want the city to step in

Kate Guimbellot and her wife knew it was only a matter of time before their house flooded again.

Over the years of owning their home in the College Meadows neighborhood in Olathe, the couple has seen their basement flood and their backyard turn into a pond multiple times. They’ve spent more than $15,000 on repairs and preventative measures to protect their home, but nothing has worked.

A city-contracted engineering assessment later found that the stormwater system is inadequately designed to handle the amount of water flowing around her home and that her home was built three feet lower than its city-approved design required.

She turned to Olathe to fix the stormwater system, but the city claims that the developer is responsible for fixing the problem.

To try and make something happen, Guimbellot filed a tort claim against the city, a legal procedure for some types of property damage or personal injuries, in April. After filing, the tort claim process requires a 120-day wait period before any further legal action can happen.

“For four months we sat, and in that four months we flooded again,” Guimbellot said on Tuesday.

In July, after the Kansas City metro saw a season of historic rains, Guimbellot’s home flooded again — the fourth flood she and her wife have endured in the eight years of owning their home.

Shortly after her home flooded, Olathe denied her tort claim in early August.

In the denial letter, City Attorney Ron Shaver wrote that the “underlying circumstances were not caused by the city” and that the city isn’t liable for the claims Guimbellot made in her complaint.

“While the city remains sympathetic to the circumstances underlying the claim, the facts … demonstrate that any fault is attributable to the developer, the developer’s engineer, and/or some other individual involved in your build, not the city of Olathe,” Shaver wrote in the denial letter.

Guimbellot said that the tort claim felt like a “delay tactic” from taking any further steps.

While she’s hesitant to file a lawsuit, she and her wife, Julie Brundies, came to speak at Tuesday’s Olathe City Council meeting to bring attention to the issue and push for the city to take some action.

“I feel like I’ve just been swept under the rug of bureaucracy,” Brundies said during the meeting. “I’ve lived in Olathe for 14 years and this is starting to wear on me. I can’t keep cleaning up these floods.”

The fourth flood

The July flood manifested exactly the same as the others in 2017, 2021 and 2024, Guimbellot said.

“Each time, water rose to four to five feet deep in our home,” she said during public comment at Tuesday’s City Council meeting.

Her home sits near an Olathe stormwater drain that can’t manage the heavy amounts of water pouring in and it causes a lake to form, “pressing against our house for hours,” she said.

“Each time, it forces its way into our house by swamping our drain tile, filling our entire finished basement of over 1,500 square feet with water ankle deep,” Guimbellot said.

While the water has come in the same way, this time around Guimbellot’s home was left with drain flies, she told The Star in an interview after the meeting.

The flood left a silt dirt behind, which can be home to these tiny flies that lay their eggs in organic matter typically found in sewer or piping systems.

“So we’re trying to kill that cycle,” she said. “Since July, I have traps down there that are blue-light, and I get rid of the filled-up one and I add a new one. And so that’s been our newest blessing.”

Max Cook, a neighbor who filed a tort claim alongside Guimbellot, saw his home flood for the second time in July, too. He and his wife built their home in 2019 and faced their first flood in 2021.

Like Guimbellot, Cook said the flooding in July resembled the first flood.

“The water rose to the foundation level, swamped the sump pump. We’re talking thousands of gallons of water rushing into the sump pump area. Obviously it’s just pumping a cycle so it can’t keep up,” Cook said.

He and his wife had a finished basement and had to rip out the carpet and trim off the walls again, hire professional companies to dry out the basement and replace the dry wall.

“It smells. It’s never going to be the same,” Rayane, Cook’s wife, said on Tuesday. “Painters come tomorrow (Wednesday). I’m tired of people in our house.”

“You should have to finish your basement once, not three times in four years.”

Additional engineering assessments and the denial

After initial reporting by The Star, David Silverstein, a retired engineer reviewed the flooding issues at Guimbellot’s home at no cost to the Olathe couple, he said during Tuesday’s meeting.

Silverstein has more than 40 years of experience managing and designing stormwater systems and stormwater management across the country. He served as the project engineer for the design and construction of the world’s largest stormwater treatment wetland for the South Florida Water District in West Palm Beach and helped with several stormwater management-related projects in the Kansas City metro area.

“I can tell you in confidence that the flooding has resulted in some systemic design oversight and failures,” Silverstein said. “I reviewed the build, grading and drainage plans and saw immediately that this home was placed in a location which should have never been approved for residential construction.”

The home is located in a former drainage way that receives runoff from nearly 100 acres upstream of the home, Silverstein said, but the designed pipe cannot handle the flow that it receives during major storm events.

In response to Silverstein’s analysis, the city contracted with engineering firm HNTB Corporation to respond to Silverstein’s claims.

“It is unclear in what capacity this retired engineer is providing this commentary, consisting of an unstamped report, and whether it is intended to be an engineering analysis,” HNTB Project Manager Zach Jarchow wrote in the engineering firm’s response.

“The Silverstein document brings up a variety of opinions and contributory factors but does not acknowledge that the home would have been unlikely to flood if the lot had been graded and the house had been constructed per plan.”

In the denial letter from the city, Olathe attorney Shaver added that the city “has an obligation to not use tax dollars to fix a problem created by third parties not under the city’s control.”

“The city is not responsible for the accuracy and adequacy of the design, and the dimensions and elevations which shall be confirmed and correlated at the job site,” the denial letter read.

For now, Guimbellot plans to continue to advocate for herself during public comment at City Council meetings.

“I will be here every two weeks,” she said. “I will rally our neighbors and I will keep shining a spotlight on it. I will individually meet with all of the city council members because I do think it’s upon all of them.”