The tree in front of Cassie Haan’s Tinley Park home was at least 50 years old, she estimated. It was taken down by workers Monday, after being damaged in the weekend storms.
“It’s hollow anyway, so it needed to come down, but the storm kind of progressed that,” Haan said. “As you drive around, you can see all the trees coming down, all the older trees.”
Haan said that besides the tree, her house on Kimberly Drive didn’t suffer damage, but the multiple bouts of severe weather recently had her worried.
“All the storms got us thinking about getting a generator,” Haan said. “Just to keep the sump pump going, just in case.”
Tinley Park was particularly hard hit by the weekend storms, said Village Manager Pat Carr. The inaugural weekend Country Fest saw tents knocked over when storms rolled in Friday.
“We got battered pretty good,” Carr said. “Fire Department was pretty busy. They had three water rescues, people caught in flood waters in their cars.”
Cleanup was still a work in progress in Tinley Park as of Monday, Carr said, with public works crews working around the clock.
“There was a lot of flooding throughout the village,” Carr said. “This was probably the most rainfall we’ve gotten in years and we’re still dealing with some of it.”
The Metropolitan Water Reclamation District said Monday the Thornton Composite Reservoir is the fullest it has been since becoming operational in 2015, at 94% capacity.
The reservoir is the largest combined sewer reservoir in the world, according to the water reclamation district. It takes in water from Chicago’s Far South Side, Calumet Park, Dixmoor, Dolton, Harvey, Landing, Markham, Phoenix, Posen, Riverdale and South Holland, an area with 556,000 people.
After setting new records, the district will let the water flow back down through a tunnel to the Calumet Water Reclamation Plant, 5 miles north of the reservoir, said Allison Fore, public and intergovernmental affairs officer
At the plant, 400 E. 130th St., Chicago, the district pumps water up about 300 feet to treat it, clean it and return it to the environment via the Little Calumet River, Fore said in an email.
The reservoir, which contains 7.3 billion gallons of water, previously had a high-water mark of 54.5% full in 2019.
Just before noon Monday, a steady stream of curious onlookers parked across State Street from the reservoir and ran over to see the spectacle of the full quarry for themselves.
“Can you believe it?” one man asked incredulously. “I never thought I’d see something like this.”
His companion answered rhetorically, “Do you know how deep that is? This is crazy!”
Several south suburban communities canceled or postponed planned Fourth of July festivities after severe thunderstorms swept in Friday and Saturday.
Park Forest Village Board member Randall White said the forced rescheduling of the village’s planned parade, concert and fireworks show for Labor Day weekend was “definitely a sad situation.”
“We live for our Fourth of July parade,” White said. “I’ve talked to people, of course, the surrounding communities — no one does it like Park Forest in the south suburbs.”
But White said Park Forest also, having been built over swamp land, struggles to recover from severe storms.
“The ground has always been really, really soft, and it sinks over time,” he said. “Even the newer houses that were just built have foundational issues because of the ground shifting.”
The village understands residents’ frustrations with poor flood infrastructure, White said, but lacks the “millions and millions of dollars” needed to improve drain systems across the board. He said the Village Board is instead working to replace outdated infrastructure gradually.
He said the village and church community is looking to help individuals in need, which he knows well as his own house and church’s basement flooded over the weekend.
“You move as fast as you can, as diligent as you can, but still, fast is not fast enough for people,” he said.
Among those Park Forest houses that flooded Friday was Aleiya Jennings’ home on Minocqua Street.
Jennings said the drains outside her house were overwhelmed by the water and overflowed back into the street and into her house, which doesn’t have a basement. The water infrastructure in the area is 75 years old, she said.
“It was sewer water coming out of the drain, into the street,” Jennings said. “It’s a failure of the infrastructure.”
Jennings’ mother, Cassandra Montgomery, showed the Daily Southtown videos of water bubbling up out of the storm drains and filling the house.
Jennings and her son had to vacate the house overnight and stay with her mother, she said. She’d had to tear the soaked carpeting out of her son’s bedroom, and her refrigerator was no longer functional because the compressor had submerged and burnt out.
Jennings has lived in her house for less than two years, she said, and in that time it has flooded four times, most recently during the last round of severe storms in mid-June.
She still hadn’t repaired everything damaged in that last flood when it happened again Friday, she said. She worries there’s nothing she can do without better flood infrastructure.
“I was literally working on getting quotes, because they said they’d have to rip at least a foot of drywall around the entire house to dry it out,” Jennings said, pointing out areas of water damage along her walls. “Glad I didn’t get that work done.”
On Monday, most of Jennings’ belongings were still piled on top of the furniture, as she’d scrambled to get everything off the floor when water started coming in.
“When it was first happening, I was just noticing it in front of the door and the closet, so I’m trying to stop it,” Jennings said. “But after awhile it was literally just wooshing in and I couldn’t stop it, so I just saved what I could.”
Dolton’s Independence Day festivities including bouncy houses and face painting, live music, food vendors and fireworks went as scheduled Thursday night, Mayor Jason House said.
But following the celebrations, the village experienced flooding due to clogged drains and about 500 outages, with all power restored by 8 p.m. on Saturday, House said. The mayor has pushed for outside funding to help boost flood infrastructure.
“While we are definitely in need, there’s a lot of need in the community,” House said. “I think if it rains to the level of a public safety emergency, I’m certain funding will come a lot faster, but at the moment, it has not risen to that level, thankfully.”
elewis@chicagotribune.com and ostevens@chicagotribune.com. News editor Paul Eisenberg contributed.
