Damon Patterson grew up exploring the creeks of Kansas City, Missouri.
“Everywhere that I lived growing up, there was always some kind of creek, either in the backyard or close by,” he said. “Those were kind of my playgrounds.”
A sense of discovery drew him to these waterways in the Town Fork Creek, Oak Park and other neighborhoods where he could reliably spot new and interesting things.
“ Birds and turtles and frogs and aquatic insects that I didn’t know what they were,” Patterson said. “It was just kind of magical to me as a child.”
Those experiences instilled a love in him for the waterways that flow through his city. The creeks of his childhood are the veins of the 40-mile Blue River — called “Kansas City’s river” by conservation groups that are trying to undo the damage of decades of pollution and habitat loss.
A recent report from Heartland Conservation Alliance and other groups says this vital waterway faces environmental challenges that are daunting but addressable.
The report suggests restoring woodlands, protecting undeveloped areas, adding more urban rain gardens to absorb and filter rainwater and reconnecting neighborhoods to the river and its creeks.
For example, the alliance is one of several groups working to address poor water quality and other problems by restoring up to 240 acres of habitat along the river to native plants like oaks and hickories.
“Natives you can look at as a functional stormwater infrastructure,” said Patterson, the alliance’s conservation project manager.
These plants fill the ground with extensive root systems and create places where rainwater can penetrate the earth. This helps shield soil from erosion and keep pollutants like lawn fertilizer out of the Blue River.
“The rainwater has a chance to soak into the ground, to filter and recharge our groundwater,” he said.
People and the river impact each other
Most people who live in the Kansas City metropolitan area live in the Blue River watershed.
It’s a 300-square-mile river basin covering parts of three counties (Johnson in Kansas and Jackson and Cass in Missouri).
When rain falls anywhere in that basin, it heads toward the Blue River or one of the many ditches and creeks that flow into it. Unfortunately, so does pollution — litter, car oil, fertilizer, pesticides and other substances that wash off of streets, lawns and parking lots during storms.
That means the Blue River and its tributaries — such as Indian, Brush and Tomahawk creeks — are exposed to pollution from the more than 20 cities they flow through on both sides of the state line.
This also impacts other communities downstream. The Blue River flows into the Missouri River, the single most important source of drinking water in the state of Missouri.
This is one example of how the Blue River and residents of this region are intertwined, a relationship that Mahreen Ansari says deserves more attention.
“We live in a natural world,” said Ansari, communications and community engagement coordinator at Heartland Conservation Alliance. “What happens and exists in that natural world will affect our health.”
Ansari believes in raising public awareness of this river system — one that many Kansas City residents don’t know much about, including its name. Although they may often spot it from the Kansas City Zoo and other spots around the city.
“We are putting a name to the river,” Ansari said. “There’s a lot of people who have unfortunately lost touch with the river.”
That’s the goal, for example, of the alliance’s annual Blue River Discovery Days — to help people learn about the river, hike trails along it and experience it from a kayak.
The state of the river
The Blue River starts near the Overland Park Arboretum and cuts northeast through the metro, flowing through Swope Park and the zoo, then past Arrowhead Stadium.
The most recent Blue River Report Card reveals a mixed picture of the river’s health.
The river system is in best shape farthest upstream — in rural and suburban Johnson County. The water quality there is decent and supports important animals, like insect larvae. Still, the report warns that “rapid development threatens these areas.”
The river system’s condition then continually worsens as it flows downstream through Kansas City to its end at the Missouri River. Flooding, erosion, water pollution and sewage overflows rank among the top problems affecting downstream stretches of the river system and the hundreds of thousands of people who live there.
The report card is based on more than 1,000 hours of data collection and analysis to understand environmental strengths and weaknesses along the river’s full length.
It was published by Heartland Conservation Alliance with help from local governments such as Kansas City, Missouri, and Overland Park; federal agencies such as the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency; and regional environmental groups such as Bridging the Gap and the Nature Conservancy of Kansas.
The increase in environmental challenges as the river system continues downstream disproportionately impacts urban residents and communities of color.
Community and social justice groups such as Metropolitan Organization for Racial and Economic Equality, or MORE2, advocate for well-managed green spaces, better walking paths and better water quality in Brush Creek. They point to the creek’s ailing condition where it runs through Black and working class neighborhoods east of Troost Avenue, prompting a community march last summer demanding improvements.
By the middle of last century, industrial development took a significant toll on the lower stretch of river and creeks (meaning farther downstream toward the Missouri River), the Blue River Report Card says. It says the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers added concrete and stones to try to address flooding, but that degraded the water quality and river habitat even more.
As for sewage, this problem stems from the fact that parts of Kansas City, Missouri, in the Blue River watershed depend on an old, combined sewer and stormwater system.
When stormwater surges, the pipes overflow into waterways, releasing sewage, too. Under an agreement reached in federal court, the city has to take steps to reduce the frequency of overflows.
What can be done
The problems that ail the Blue River and its tributaries partly stem from the metro having too many surfaces that can’t absorb stormwater — such as pavement, parking lots and lawns — and too few quality green spaces and gardens that can.
The situation risks getting worse as development swallows more and more of Johnson County’s remaining rural areas, creating more impervious surfaces.
Without action, the report says, this upstream part of the watershed will likely be fully developed by 2050, exacerbating flooding, erosion and water pollution.
“Natural streams may no longer support wildlife, flood risks will intensify and once intact habitats could be lost forever,” it says.
But preserving existing woodlands, prairies and other undeveloped areas — and replanting vegetation in developed areas — would help the river and its creeks, the report card says.
This is especially important on and near their banks, where lush buffer zones of native plants, called riparian corridors, could do a lot to improve the river’s health.
Work is underway to restore 250 acres of this kind of habitat, among other efforts, with funding from the American Rescue Plan Act. The goal is to “renew the Blue.”
“This is one of the most significant riparian restoration projects in our region that we’ve had,” said Natalie Unruh, the water quality planner at the Mid-America Regional Council. “I’m imagining it as sort of a catalyst and a primer and a starting point to show people, ‘We can do this work, we can learn from it.’”
The Mid-America Regional Council, or MARC, guides metropolitan planning in the bistate Kansas City region and it’s helping with the American Rescue Plan project. MARC encourages cities to view quality green spaces, such as riparian habitat, as a critical component of stormwater infrastructure.
“They’re doing the water quality improvement, they’re doing flood mitigation,” Unruh said. But also, “they’re providing habitat benefits and recreation benefits. There’s a whole suite of good things.”
And that, in turn, benefits people, Ansari from Heartland Conservation Alliance said.
“Access to green spaces and access to nature-based recreation inevitably makes people feel better,” Ansari said. “It improves mental health.”
Celia Llopis-Jepsen is an environment reporter for Harvest Public Media and host of the environmental podcast Up From Dust. You can follow her on Bluesky or email her at celia (at) kcur (dot) org.
Harvest Public Media is a collaboration of public media newsrooms in the Midwest and Great Plains. It reports on food systems, agriculture and rural issues.
