Hundreds of Chicagoland residents woke up to flooded homes Tuesday night into Wednesday after record-breaking rain dumped 2.43 inches on O’Hare Airport and pushed city crews, plumbers and homeowners into cleanup mode. The rain also set an April 14 record at O’Hare, breaking the old mark of 1.21 inches set in 1949.
By Wednesday morning, Chicago’s 311 service request hotline had logged more than 600 flooding complaints since midnight Tuesday, with 114 of them coming from Norwood Park on the city’s Northwest Side. Lorraine Runge said her basement was dry at 10 p.m. and then had about two inches of water an hour later. “It’s like a big wave comes up, because it happens so fast,” she said. “I think everybody got flooded.”
The rain was the rainiest April day at O’Hare since 3.54 inches fell in 2013, and it arrived after a major storm rolled through the region overnight. The flood watch now covers the metro area, all of Northern Illinois and Northwest Indiana, with areas around the Des Plaines River in Riverside and River Forest under an alert through Friday evening. The possibility of tornadoes was described as minimal compared with earlier in the week, keeping the main threat squarely on water, not wind.
At street level, the damage looked immediate and personal. Sadie Douglas said she felt helpless when she did not know how much water was coming in, worried she would lose everything and have to start over while working as a server. She described furniture shoved out of place and a kitchen that looked like a mud pie and a swamp. Benjamin Vance said Rescue Plumbing had crews helping clean up 15 homes by midday Wednesday and had 14 more on its waiting list. “We’re totally booked out,” he said. “We can’t take any more calls.”
That backlog shows how fast the flooding spread, and why the cleanup will outlast the storm itself. In Des Plaines, sandbags can be picked up at the Public Works facility at 1111 Joseph Schwab Road, and remote sandbag filling stations could be set up as conditions develop. The question now is not whether the rain was historic — it was — but how many more homes, basements and streets will still be dealing with the water when the flood watch expires Friday evening.