Downpours left basements, streets flooded throughout North and Northwest sides, and a few say it is a recurring downside

CHICAGO (CBS) — Sheets of rainfall on Sunday overwhelmed the sewers and created wild pictures of water flooding viaducts and gushing out of drains like geysers.

On Monday, an intense cleanup was in progress. In the meantime, CBS 2’s Chris Tye explored the place the storms hit, the requires service, and why sure neighborhoods get hit the toughest most frequently.

In Rogers Park, everybody who lives 1700 block of West Columbia Avenue – between Ravenswood and Hermitage avenues – ended up with water of their basements.

The wet Sunday gave approach there to a Monday of insurance coverage estimators, industrial suction vacs, and folks reflecting on how usually this occurs within the space.

Some say they’ve felt this similar pinch 4 or 5 instances within the final 10 years – and so they say it is getting outdated, moist, and drained rapidly.

“The worst – for certain,” mentioned Rogers Park home-owner Estelle Pizzo. “I have been right here 25 years.”

After all, something effervescent over like a fountain in a single’s house – wanting an precise fountain – is unwelcome. However the final place anybody would hope for such a factor to occur is the bathroom.

Guess what occurred to Pizzo.

“It wasn’t simply rainwater – it was sewage arising from the ground drain and the bathroom, which is – I’ve by no means seen it come out of the bathroom earlier than,” she mentioned.

A complete of seven inches of rain fell in a single hour in Rogers Park, sending that filthy water up by the bathrooms and grates. It rose almost as quick out on the road in entrance of Pizzo’s home.

“The water got here all the best way up nearly to mid-hubcap,” Pizzo mentioned.

In the meantime everywhere in the North Aspect, water geysers shot into the air from metropolis streets and metallic sewer covers went flying. The deluge introduced an ideal storm of a lot water and an underground system that could not sustain.

CBS 2 tracked the components of the town the place the rain fell hardest and quickest. They seem within the darker colours within the map under.

These are additionally precisely the neighborhoods the place calls to 311 for water in basements and water on the highway — mirrored in blue dots on this second map — got here in most continuously.  

From Sunday to Monday morning, there have been greater than 900 calls from six Chicago neighborhood areas on the North and Northwest sides alone.

Portage Park had probably the most – with 343 calls about basement flooding and 31 about road flooding – for a complete of 374. Edgewater adopted – with 145 requires basement flooding and 26 for road flooding – for a complete of 171.

“You undergo this and its maddening,” Pizzo mentioned.

Including to the insanity for Pizzo is a worry that extra new building in her neighborhood will solely add extra stress to infrastructure system already examined to the restrict.

“We’ve got to get our methods to deal with extra excessive issues,” she mentioned.

We reached out to numerous the aldermen on this space Monday. None bought again to us. Neither did the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District, which manages the sewer methods.

In the meantime, owners say after this spherical, the questions might be sharper – and the demand for solutions might be a bit extra pointed.

We additionally dug into some extra information. Imagine it or not, on the subject of flooding, Sunday ranked eighth among the many highest variety of flooding calls ever.

The worst was July 24, 2010, when 311 operators acquired greater than 3,000 requires flooded basements or streets. That’s adopted by storms in 2013, after which 2011.