The flooring in four rooms of Yuriria Buenrostro’s Southwest Side basement was stripped away as damp carpet mats filled up her trash can.
Buenrostro, 40, has been trying to renovate the home she shares with her husband and two children but anticipates damage from the storms could cost in excess of $15,000 after her home flooded twice in the span of three weeks.
“Imagine you have money saved up for vacations, you’d lose that investing in your house again,” Buenrostro said. “I hope the city helps us.”
A couple of blocks away from Buenrostro’s home, Mayor Brandon Johnson and other city officials visited residents impacted by the floods and dropped off supply kits.
“Chicagoans recovering from one flooding incident have found themselves having to start all over again,” Johnson told reporters Tuesday morning. “We will continue to direct city resources to the affected areas to ensure that Chicagoans are not facing this crisis alone.”
Johnson blamed the flooding on climate change and water management systems on the South and West Sides that were “never properly built” and called for state and federal funding to help alleviate the issue.
“The city failed to plan properly in the past, and we will continue to see damaging flooding incidents until there are some real structural changes and improvements to our infrastructure as a whole,” Johnson said.
Shortly after taking office in 2011, then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel rejected calls to privatize Chicago’s water system and embarked on what he called a “great jobs bill.”
Emanuel convinced the City Council to raise water and sewer rates by $120 a year for the average homeowner — by doubling those rates over four years and locking in annual cost-of-living increases after that — to replace all 900 miles of the city’s century-old water pipes and reline or replace 750 miles of 100-year-old sewer lines.
“I didn’t just raise the rates. I’m rebuilding the system. … We will not have the city we want if we don’t keep the resources we have and invest in it,” Emanuel said then.
“It’s something that should be looked at and possibly mimicked if it leads to solving the problem,” said Rich Guidice, who ran the Office of Emergency Management and Communications under Emanuel and later became Johnson’s first chief of staff.
“Of course, you’d have to re-establish a relationship with the federal government to help you out with that. …The city obviously doesn’t have any money at the moment.”
In the meantime, Guidice advised the city to embark on more frequent cleaning of sewers in flood-prone areas.
“Normally, that mitigation is done in the spring. But in these areas that are constantly hit, there should be a preventative mitigation program knowing it’s prone to flooding,” he said.
Guidice noted that the North Side’s Albany Park neighborhood had chronic flooding problems until a $70 million underground pipeline was built.
The one-mile tunnel is located 150 feet below Foster Avenue and runs east from Eugene Field Park to the North Shore Channel. During heavy rains, the pipeline moves excess water from the north branch of the Chicago River into the North Shore Channel, a drainage canal that runs from the Chicago River north to Wilmette in Lake Michigan.
“Since that was done, we have not had a problem in Albany Park,” Guidice said Tuesday.
Maria Hernandez went without sleep Sunday as she spent most of the night cleaning the home she’s lived in for 30 years.
Hernandez, 75, started having electrical issues after the flooding July 25 and sustained damage to her freshly painted basement walls over the weekend.
She and her family stayed up through Monday night’s storms worried the flooding would occur again.
Lightning strikes the skyline as storms moved through the area Monday evening. Nearly 2 inches of rain fell at O’Hare Airport, causing flight delays. From Saturday to Tuesday morning, there have been over 5,600 calls for flooded basements, according to the city’s Office of Emergency Management and Communications.
Tyler Pasciak LaRiviere/Sun-Times
“We’re nervous when it starts to rain again because we’re seniors,” Hernandez said. “It’s scary because it’s never happened like this before.”
Nearly 1.9 inches of rain fell at O’Hare Airport, with 3 to 4 inches reported in parts of southern Cook County into Lake County, Indiana, according to the National Weather Service.
CTA Purple Line service was temporarily suspended due to downed tree limbs from the storms, and street flooding was reported in parts of the southwest suburbs, city officials said.
Meanwhile, OEMC is partnering with the Illinois Management Agency to gather extra flooding information through a self-assessment survey to determine whether more options can be pursued to help residents, OEMC said.