Flagpole installation inTopeka, KS

Flagpoles in Topeka

A government town first — the Statehouse, the state agencies, the courts and the Air Guard — with rail shops and food plants around the edges of it. We cover Topeka and the Shawnee County area, including the Statehouse and the Capitol grounds, Kansas Avenue and the downtown blocks, the NOTO Arts District, Washburn University, the Brown v. Board of Education National Historical Park at Monroe School, Gage Park, Forbes Field and the Oakland and North Topeka bottoms.

Wind here. Topeka sits in a part sheltered, part wide open area, which works out to roughly 110 mph under the code your town uses. That figure decides how wide and how thick the pole has to be, so we check it against your address before we quote. Work on state property in Topeka is not a city job. The Office of Facilities and Property Management sets the standards for state-owned buildings and reviews them through its own design and construction manual, so a pole on the Capitol grounds or beside a state office follows that route and not the city's. The 1966 tornado came off Burnett's Mound and ran northeast through Washburn and into downtown, and it still comes up on a site visit here. It is worth being plain about it: the design figure is a thunderstorm and straight-line wind number, and nothing we quote is a tornado rating. North Topeka and Oakland sit on Kansas River bottom behind levees, silt and sand instead of the rock under the hill, so a footing there is figured differently from one at Washburn or out west along Wanamaker.

Most of the people who call us from Topeka are state agency buildings, county and city facilities, courts, schools and university buildings, veterans posts, churches, hospitals and the rail and food plants on the edge of town.