After a cold start today, the temperatures will rise to about 36 degrees, according to the National Weather Service.
The forecast includes rain possible on Friday night and Saturday, and snow possible on Tuesday, the weather service said.
Non-severe thunderstorms are possible on Saturday, according to the weather service.
Today will see increasing clouds, with a high near 36 and a south southwest wind of 3 to 8 mph, the weather service said. The temperature was 24 degrees at 9 a.m.
Tonight, expect mostly cloudy skies with a low of 24 and an east southeast wind of 3 to 8 mph, according to the weather service. On Wednesday night and Thursday morning, snow is possible to the north, near St. Joseph, Missouri, but it is not in the Wyandotte County forecast.
Thursday, the high will be near 41 with mostly cloudy skies and an east southeast wind of 8 to 11 mph, the weather service said.
Thursday night, it will be cloudy with a low of 26 and an east northeast wind of 5 to 8 mph becoming north after midnight, according to the weather service.
Friday, it will be partly sunny with a high near 43, and a north wind of 5 to 7 mph, the weather servie said.
Friday night, there is a 70 percent chance of showers after midnight, with a low of 36. Between a tenth and quarter-inch of rain is possible.
Saturday, there is a 100 percent chance of showers and possibly a thunderstorm before noon, then a chance of showers and thunderstorms after noon, the weather service said.
Saturday night, it will be partly cloudy with a low of 29, according to the weather service.
Sunday, it will be sunny with a high near 43, the weather service said.
Sunday night, it will be mostly clear with a low of 25, according to the weather service.
Monday, it will be sunny with a high near 44, the weather service said.
Monday night, it will be mostly cloudy with a low of 30, according to the weather service.
Tuesday, there is a 70 percent chance of ran and snow, with a high near 44, the weather service said.
Ron Klataske, center, is a rancher and leads Audubon of Kansas. At a gathering last week in Kansas City, Kansas, he said the proposed changes to federal waterway oversight are the “greatest rollback of conservation and protection of ecological resources that has occurred, ever.” (Photo by Frank Morris, KCUR, Kansas News Service)
by Frank Morris, Kansas News Service
The water we drink is protected by federal rules, which are at the crux of a long-running fight over how far upstream that protection extends.
“Agriculture is land and water. When you’ve got control of the water, you’ve got control of the land,” said Blake Roderick with the National Waterways Conference.
Under the Waters of the United States rule, which took effect in 2015 under the Obama administration, ponds, wetlands and creeks that only sometimes flow into the larger water system received federal protection.
But the Environmental Protection Agency under the Trump administration wants to exclude millions of acres of those wetlands and thousands of miles of streams. Streams that only run after rain storms would no longer be federally protected, and neither would about half the nation’s wetlands or any of the groundwater. Roadside ditches also are out.
The debate came to a head at the end of February in Kansas City, Kansas, at the only public hearing on the Trump administration’s proposed rules.
“The old rule was just regulating way too much,” Roderick said there. “It wasn’t regulating the types of things that were traditionally regulated under the clean water act.”
The proposed changes would be good for business, according to Ryan Fisher, principal deputy assistant secretary of the Army for Civil Works. He oversees the Army Corps of Engineers’ water program.
“We are certainly looking to balance protecting federal waters, with the need to support national economic interests,” Ryan said.
Groups representing miners, oil and gas producers, farmers and construction companies also support the rollback, because it would lift federal oversight from vast swaths of land. And engineers who run rural public water systems like it too, because it would strip a lot of the expense and hassle out of damming some streams.
Profit vs. science?
But Geoff Grisler with the Southern Environmental Law Center testified that profit — not science — is driving the rule change.
“This is about making it easier for heavily polluting industries to contaminate our waterways, to fill in streams and wetlands, and pass their cost, and the responsibility for their pollution, to all of us who live downstream,” Grisler said.
He argued that, under the proposed rules, a lot of people may end up drinking more tainted water or paying higher water bills to have it cleaned.
Downstream companies could also suffer.
“Our business is built on clean water,” said Brian McGeehan, who co-owns Montana Angler, a fly-fishing service.
“Clean water shouldn’t be a pro-business verses pro-conservation issue,” McGeehan said. “A strong Clean Water Act is pro-business.”
Environmentalists said protected wetlands can help mitigate flooding, a function that’s more important considering the rate of climate change.
Matt Stahman, who farms west of Houston, told Harvest Public Media that he’s watched wetlands disappear in his area for nearly 50 years. And when Hurricane Harvey ravaged Texas in 2017, he saw water that might have been absorbed upstream pool in Houston, contributing to catastrophic flooding.
“You add more impermeable surface, you fill more wetlands, you add more flood water downstream. It’s pretty straightforward,” he said.
And while the science showing that upstream pollution tends to wind up downstream is pretty basic (think about the water cycle you learned in grade school), this isn’t really about science. It’s a legal question.
The public comment period ends April 15, and the government can impose the changes sometime after that. Environmentalists and upstream business interests have been litigating the scope of the Clean Water Act since it passed in 1972, and it’s likely that cycle won’t be disrupted.
Dr. Belinda Vail and her team at the University of Kansas Health System have received a grant award for improving adolescent immunization rates. (Submitted photo)
The University of Kansas Health System received a grant award recently for improving adolescent immunization rates.
Immunize Kansas Coalition honored four organizations recently with the grant awards.
The KU Health System, Department of Family Medicine, received the outstanding residency program award.
The grant award was developed in 2015 to support innovative, collaborative and sustainable methods to increase age-appropriate immunization rates for Kansas adolescents.
Immunize Kansas Coalition identified human papillomavirus (HPV) and meningococcal vaccines as specific targets for improvement in 2015 as rates of immunizations for adolescents in Kansas were among the lowest in the nation.
In 2017, Kansas adolescent immunization rates, while improved from 2015, were below the national rate for both HPV-initiation (52.4 vs 65.5 percent) and meningococcal (72.1 vs 85.1 percent). In this award cycle IKC asked providers to include Tdap (tetanus, diphtheria and pertussis) immunizations in their rate improvement efforts in response to the identification of bundling – or offering all of the recommended adolescent immunizations together – as a best practice approach to adolescent immunization rate improvement.
The University of Kansas Health System Department of Family Medicine in Kansas City, Kansas, under the leadership of Dr. Belinda Vail, implemented several methods of patient contact and follow-up with the aim of improving adolescent immunization rates. Dr. Vail and her team found that telephone follow-up resulted in the highest rate of completed immunization. From this success, Dr. Vail and team intend to continue to use clinic staff to make follow-up, personal contacts with patients when they are due for immunizations, according to a spokesman.
