Flagpole installation acrossKansas

Flagpoles in Kansas

One design wind speed covers Kansas from the Missouri line to the Colorado line, so what decides the pole is the ground under it and what stands upwind. Pole, foundation, flag and the labour to set it come back as one figure.

Wind here. Kansas is four hundred miles across and the design wind speed is the same at both ends: around 110 mph on the Missouri line and around 110 mph at Goodland against the Colorado border. That is the whole of what the map tells you. Everything that changes the pole is local. Exposure, the code's word for how much open ground the wind crosses before it reaches you, shifts street by street: a sheltered corner in Prairie Village and a school standing on its own beside a section line outside Hutchinson share a number and take different shafts. So does what is under the hole, rock in the east and loose river ground through the middle. Kansas leaves building codes to each city and county, so the edition in force is read for the address rather than assumed. Tornadoes sit outside all of it. The design maps cover thunderstorm and straight-line wind, an ordinary building is not engineered against a tornado, and nothing here is a tornado rating.

• The Kansas City edge and the Kaw valley — Around 110 mph, over the most sheltered ground in the state: grown suburbs, tree cover and buildings standing close together. A standard wall usually suits. What varies is the digging, because the limestone under Johnson and Wyandotte counties comes up shallow in places.
• The Flint Hills and the eastern prairie — The same 110 on the map, over open pasture the wind crosses without meeting anything. This is where the mapped figure and the real condition part company, and the shaft is sized to the ground rather than to the county.
• The Arkansas River valley and south central Kansas — No change in the wind figure. The change is underneath: loose clay, silt, sand and gravel instead of rock. The pole is ordinary; the hole is wider and deeper than the same job would want on the eastern shale.
• The High Plains and the west — 110 again, with nothing upwind in any direction, grit through the spring and hard sun the rest of the year. That is a finish decision more than a wall decision: anodized rather than a mill finish, and stainless rather than plated hardware.

Flying the Kansas flag? We sell it, sewn to the state's own design specification and sized to sit under the national flag on your pole. See the Kansas flag →