All that rainwater with no place to go.
When the heavens opened earlier this week, dumping a record amount of rain on parts of the Chicago area, stormwater management systems were overwhelmed.
Despite miles and miles of Deep Tunnel and suburban stormwater projects designed to reduce the type of flooding that victimized thousands of Chicagoans and suburbanites, the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Greater Chicago was forced to open its locks, sending almost a billion gallons of stormwater and untreated sewage from the Chicago River into Lake Michigan.
Water officials and experts said it proves one thing: Technology, no matter how advanced, can’t stop an act of God.
“Ain’t a damned thing anybody can do when you get 4 to 5 inches of rain in one hour,” said district president Thomas Fuller.
Homeowners in Chicago and the suburbs spent Friday trying to recover from the devastation. More than 7,400 residents in the metropolitan Chicago area and Will County were without phone service Friday, said Ameritech Illinois spokeswoman Lisa Kim.
Two storm-related deaths were reported in Will County: a 61-year-old Channahon man carried away by currents while helping neighbors, and an 84-year-old Joliet man who suffered a heart attack while cleaning his basement. Nearly 13,000 homes and 170 roads were affected in Will County alone, county officials said.
A water-boiling order is in effect until early next week in Sugar Grove, and several roads in DuPage County remained closed Friday. In the city, Chicago River levels returned to normal and beaches were reopened Friday. At least 5,000 residents had requested city workers’ assistance in pumping water out of basements.
The area’s drainage and storage systems functioned normally during the abnormal downpour. That’s not much consolation to people recovering from submerged cars and houses turned into islands, but a relief considering that it could have been worse, officials said.
But more than 20 years after the Reclamation District’s Deep Tunnel project started, how close is the water agency to being able to prevent–or at least reduce the severity of–catastrophes like this week’s flooding?
“It’s really not designed to handle a situation like this,” said Scott Bernstein, executive director of the Center for Neighborhood Technology in Chicago. “You’d have to redesign the whole area to accommodate a rain like this.”
Although forecasters talked of the rains in grandiose terms, calling them “100-year storms,” it is impossible to tell how often such storms occur because recorded weather history is so short. In many Illinois communities, records go back only 100 years.
It is incorrect to think of the storm as a cyclical event anyway, said Wayne Wendland, state climatologist for the Illinois State Water Survey.
“Within a nine-year period, we’ve received the 100-year flood twice,” said Brook McDonald, executive director of the Conservation Foundation of DuPage County, speaking of floods in 1987 and this year.
And no system is designed to accommodate more rainfall than what one would expect in a so-called 100-year storm, which is 7.5 inches over a 24-hour period, said Jeff Dailey, chief engineer of the DuPage County stormwater management division. Some areas of DuPage County reported double-digit amounts over 24 hours this week.
When the Deep Tunnel idea was developed in 1972, there were two goals: to decrease pollution from sewers and to alleviate flooding by catching stormwater.
But the major idea was to decrease pollution, Bernstein said, and there have yet to be comprehensive ideas for dealing with flooding.
With continued land development, particularly in the suburbs, and increasingly unpredictable and extreme weather conditions, the district and other agencies say they are doing the best they can to alleviate the problem.
The only choice was to open the locks, said Reclamation District spokeswoman Peggy Bradley. The tunnel, which currently snakes for 75 miles beneath Cook County, was filled to capacity with 1.2 billion gallons of water Wednesday night. The Chicago River was rising, and when it reached the level of Lake Michigan, the decision was made to unleash storm water and sewage, Bradley said.
Water officials said that if all the reservoirs designed to catch stormwater were complete, the entire project would have the capacity to hold 18 billion gallons of water, and the locks may not have been opened.
But the reservoirs aren’t ready, and neither is the tunnel. The reservoirs won’t be finished for at least 10 years, Fuller said, and the tunnel is about 75 percent complete. When it actually will be finished depends on how much funding the district is able to secure from the federal government. Fuller estimates a cost of a half-billion dollars to finish the project.
Bernstein, a longtime critic of the tunnel, said the flooding proves that government agencies and the public must become more creative in finding alternatives to deal with flooding.
“This is a classic example of one very large, megaproject that can’t do it all,” he said.
In Cook County’s suburbs and in the collar counties, where open land is being filled with blacktop, many communities also are seeking methods of easing stormwater runoff.
One conservationist says the floods were simply business as usual for flood plains on which developers never should have built houses.
“A flood plain is supposed to flood. They’ve been flooding since the beginning of time,” said McDonald of the Conservation Foundation of DuPage County.
Similarly, Chicago was built on swampland, and flooding is to be expected as development increases, said Laurene Von Klan, executive director of Friends of the Chicago River. Von Klan said that developed-land cover in the Chicago area has increased by more than 40 percent as the population has grown only by 4 percent.
“We’ve covered rich, open soils with hard shells of roads, streets and parking lots,” she said. “The water really has no place to go.”
The last time there was comparable flooding in DuPage County, for example, was in 1987, when about a foot of rain over two days caused Salt Creek to overflow its banks, resulting in more than $100 million in damage.
Afterward, the state mandated that counties create stormwater management plans.
“You can’t prepare for every extreme, but we could be a lot smarter about how we deal with where rain goes,” Von Klan said. “Growth that ignores nature is just unwise. We need to pay more attention to the way we’re growing and how we live with water and land.”
