Vanessa Whiteside is spilling Wichita’s secrets. Whiteside, a travel blogger and writer, again draws on her natural curiosity and the love of her hometown for her second Wichita-centric book published through Reedy Press. In the introduction to “Secret Wichita: A Guide to the Weird, Wonderful, and Obscure,” Whiteside writes that she took on the task of sharing Wichita’s secrets “because I wanted to learn as much as possible about the city’s hidden gems, forgotten stories, and intriguing spaces.” The book highlights more than 80 people, places, artifacts, collections and things in Wichita that fall in the category of being weird, wonderful, obscure and maybe, in some cases, odd. Some will be familiar to locals, while some are likely lesser known, such as a museum dedicated to military tanks, a buried robot, a steampunk village in a west Wichita residential community, and a giant rollercoaster that was part of an amusement area on an island in the middle of the city.
Source: Local News | Wichita Eagle

Wichita residents living above a chemical spill from Union Pacific Railroad face property damages and a loss of property value as a result of the company’s negligence, according to a federal lawsuit filed this week by law firms across the country. The class-action lawsuit addresses a chemical spill at a Union Pacific rail yard near 29th North and Grove, which many Wichita residents learned about last year. The spill – which contains trichloroethylene, a carcinogenic degreasing agent – contaminated the groundwater beneath about 2,800 addresses. The groundwater plume runs about 3 miles, from 29th Street to the north to Murdock to the south, through many historically Black neighborhoods. “We’re concerned about the … impact on people’s home values,” said Chris Nidel, a lawyer with the Maryland-based Nidel & Nace firm, which helped file the lawsuit.
Source: Local News | Wichita Eagle