An all-time record 9.35 inches of rain deluged the Chicago area late Thursday and most of Friday, causing millions of dollars in damage and millions of miles of frayed nerves in a chaotic day that extended the morning rush hour into the early evening for thousands.
And the National Weather Service said there could be more of the same early Saturday in a weather report it issued shortly before it closed down after its electrical power was knocked out by flooding in its offices near O`Hare International Airport.
The rains came at about 9 p.m. Thursday and, in a freakish pattern, continued at a pace of nearly an inch an hour until mid-Friday morning when the storm turned to drizzle. The official 24-hour record rain accumulation had been 6.24 inches accumulated on July 12-13, 1957. But that record had become ancient history in just slightly over 12 hours in Chicago Friday, when, at 10 a.m., a total of 8.98 inches already had fallen. By 4 p.m. Friday, the record had climbed to 9.35 inches.
The storm`s effects were as staggering as its statistics.
According to National Weather Service conversion formulas, if the rain had been snow, Chicago and its northern suburbs would have been buried under about 93 inches, about as much as during the entire infamous winter of 1979, when it took several weeks to accumulate that amount.
Gov. James Thompson, in response to calls from suburban mayors from the western and northern suburbs, declared Cook and Du Page Counties disaster areas and ordered Illinois National Guard troops into the flooded areas to help in traffic control and provide security for persons who feared for the contents of their evacuated homes.
Especially hard hit were portions of the Kennedy and Edens Expressways and Lake Shore Drive in Chicago, where as many as 300 vehicles were stranded in waters that rose as high as 6 feet.
By the beginning of the morning rush hour, the Kennedy Expressway at Addison Street had been redubbed Lake Kennedy, as water overwhelmed the Chicago Transit Authority rapid-transit tracks at that location.
In the morning, some drivers, noting that cars and trucks were trapped in the rising waters, made illegal U-turns and headed back northward on the Kennedy, seeking out entrance ramps they could use for exiting. Others were trapped for hours behind the vehicles in the water, extending the morning rush hour until evening.
O`Hare International Airport became a virtual island for most of Friday with incoming and outgoing passengers at the airport trapped at the sprawling facility with few planes coming or going and no roads or mass-transit service open to the outside world.
Many trapped at the airport or along the rain and traffic-clogged streets and highways adopted the almost festive air of joining together as victims of one of Chicago`s legendary days in weather history, but in other areas the problems were serious and tragic.
At least four weather-related deaths were reported.
On the Kennedy Expressway, at the peak of the rainstorm, a Little Falls, Minn., truck driver, Richard Palluck, 35, was killed and a passenger was injured when the truck he was driving hit a flooded area and crashed into an expressway embankment.
On the Near North Side, Johnny McQuinston, 14, was electrocuted after a delivery truck he had jumped on with four of his friends hit a live wire at the top of the Wellington Avenue viaduct on Honore Street.
Jose Arelland, 26, of unincorporated Des Plaines, may have been another electrocution victim when he returned to his flooded basement to retrieve a set of keys.
In Downstate Ogle County, Susan Bartlett, 23, of Rochelle, drowned when the car she was driving left the road and plunged into a flooded ditch.
In the north suburbs, which had been the victim of devastating flooding last fall, it was like a nightmare returned as the rain-swollen rivers lapped at the riverbanks they had exceeded before.
In Forest Hospital in Des Plaines, the administration called an emergency as waters flooded the parking lot and seeped into the first floor. As many as 140 patients were evacuated through waist-high water to nearby hospital facilities by early afternoon.
At Resurrection Hospital, 7435 W. Talcott Ave., the entire first floor of the hospital, including the emergency room, was flooded with a foot of water, causing emergency oprations to be moved to an impromptu location on another floor. Ambulances were diverted to other hospitals. Although water had not seeped into Lutheran General Hospital in Park Ridge, hospital administrators said their entire parking lot was under water and the surrounding area had been so hard hit that many employees had not made it into work.
Lawrence House, a senior citizens` facility at Lawrence and Kenmore Avenues, evacuated about 400 residents after efforts to clear water from the basement failed.
The intensity of the rainfall early Friday was so great that the much-heralded, although sometimes maligned, Deep Tunnel project of the Metropolitan Sanitary District, designed to handle exactly the kind of downpour that hit the Chicago area, was filled to its 1-billion-gallon brim by 3 a.m.
At that time, sanitary district locks at Wilmette were opened, dumping millions of gallons of storm sewer water into Lake Michigan.
At about 9:30 a.m., the locks of the Chicago River in downtown Chicago had to be opened as river levels rose nearly 5 feet, stranding Chicago Police Department boats and Wendella tour boats in their river moorings because the water was too high to allow them to proceed under the bridges.
By Friday evening, sanitary district officials estimated that more than 1.3 billion gallons of storm water had rushed into Lake Michigan from the Wilmette locks and from the Chicago River, which had changed in color from its usual bilious green to a dark, mud-filled black. The Chicago River locks were closed by early Friday evening, but the Wilmette docks remained open, continuing to pump overflow water into the lake.
The outpouring of untreated rain water took its toll on the Chicago shoreline as well, and the Chicago Park District closed all of its city beaches on both the North and South Sides until tests could be completed to determine the amount of pollution the storm caused.
Park district officials also ordered the halt of swimming in the Humboldt Park and Douglas Park lagoons because the heavy rainfall had caused a runoff of fertilizer into the water.
The disastrous evening rush hour was tempered a bit by the fact that thousands of commuters just simply didn`t make it to work in downtown Chicago Friday, and others left work early to go home and help those they left behind bail out basements and back yards.
Some employers let workers go home out of sympathy, and others, such as the First National Bank of Chicago, closed out of necessity in the early afternoon when its Loop building lost all of its electrical power.
The Criminal Courts Building at 26th Street and California Avenue and its nearby administration building closed when flooding hit, and the main Chicago Public Library building at 425 N. Michigan Ave. closed down early when water invaded its lower level elevator machinery, making them inoperable.
The new State of Illinois Center, often mocked because of a faulty air-conditioning system when it first opened, developed several leaks in its round glass facade Friday, forcing building workers to place large garbage containers on the lower floors to catch in dripping waters.
It was a day of ironies, from the forced closing of the Chicago office of the National Weather Service, because of flooding, to the first annual Riverfest at North Michigan Avenue at the Chicago River, held to salute the river for its cultural contribution to the city. Festival sponsors said they wanted to call attention to the elimination of pollution in the river in recent years. But Friday`s noontime celebration had to be moved into the lobby of the nearby Hyatt Regency Hotel instead of on the entertainment yacht that could not negotiate the river, which was discharging its dirty storm water into the lake.
Over at the Daley Center Plaza, the giant Picasso statue was left to celebrate its 10th birthday all by itself as the official ceremonies moved inside the Daley Center itself.
And Festa Italiana canceled its first day at Olive Park, but festival officials vowed to carry on the schedule Saturday and Sunday.
As it was last fall, the deluge was as selective as it was vicious, concentrated in the northern section of Chicago and the western and northern suburbs.
For example, as the storm`s fury diminished, northwest suburban Arlington Heights had measured about 7.5 inches of rain in a 12-hour period, while south suburban Lockport had only .03 of an inch. In Chicago, 3.05 inches were recorded by the sanitary district at its measuring station at Erie Street and Michigan Avenue, but only .43 of an inch fell at 87th Street and Western Avenue.
And, as it was last fall, the rain-gorged Des Plaines River was again the subject of great attention, as it rose 2 feet above its flood stage Friday, causing a resurgence of the anxiety it caused when it flooded last fall.
Government officials feared the river would continue to rise throughout the night, probably cresting by mid-day Saturday.
Illinois National Guardsmen were sent to Elmhurst, where officials feared possible looting in areas left vacant by flood victims.
The state government sent an emergency supply of 15,000 sandbags to Du Page County late Friday, and a shipment of 50 water pumps from the state Emergency Services and Disaster Agency were ordered from Peoria to be shipped to the western suburbs.
Early Friday, Du Page County Board Chairman Jack Knuepfer signed an emergency declaration giving the ESDA authorization to commandeer county supplies and equipment to aid in the assistance effort.
The American Red Cross sent damage-assessment teams into portions of Cook and Du Page Counties Friday to monitor flooding and determine whether emergency disaster-relief shelters should be set up for flood victims.
Red Cross spokesmen said a preliminary, ”very rough” inspection showed that an estimated 3,000 homes were damaged by water in Chicago and Cook and Du Page Counties. Of those, about 1,000 were in Chicago, about 1,000 in Du Page County and another 1,000 in northern Cook County. Inspectors will continue their surveys Saturday to refine their estimates of flood damage, Fred Sabine, a Red Cross spokesman, said.
As the rains cleared, at least for the moment, government officials, area residents and even sports officials stepped back to assess the damage caused by the heaviest rainfall in Chicago-area history.
At the Butler National Golf Club in Oak Brook, for example, where the Western Open tournament will be played next week, 8.3 inches of rain had fallen by late Friday. But Oscar Miles, the club`s superintendent, said he felt confident the tournament could begin next Thursday.
Not so confident was John Coulter, research director for the Chicago Association of Commerce and Industry, who estimated that the Friday storm already could have caused ”many millions of dollars” in damages or lost business, such as at the Harlem-Irving Shopping Plaza in Norridge, which was forced to close shortly before noon Friday because customers could not reach the stores because of flooded parking lots.
Gregg Durham, a spokesman for the ESDA, said that so far the freak rainstorm had not been as bad as last October`s flooding, which caused about $40 million in damages in Cook, Lake and McHenry Counties.
Not as bad, perhaps, but, most agreed who suffered through the storm and its related effects Friday, bad enough.
