State and federal inspectors began the process Monday of assessing the damage caused to Cook and Du Page Counties by last week`s heavy rain and its aftermath of flooding.
A helicopter tour showed that the hardest-hit areas in Du Page County were Elmhurst, Villa Park and Addison, where residents continued to paddle about in rafts on flooded major streets and hundreds of houses were surrounded by water from the swollen Salt Creek.
In Cook County, the villages of Riverside and Brookfield, across the Des Plaines River from each other, continued to battle the floodwaters after a discouraging setback caused by heavy rains late Sunday and early Monday.
Gary Jaeckel, an Elmhurst city aide, said 1,700 houses were flooded and 300 to 400 residents had been evacuated from their homes in that Du Page municipality. Officials estimated that over the weekend there were 600 flooded houses in Addison, 45 in Villa Park, 750 in Carol Stream, 100 in Brookfield and 80 in Riverside.
Even as conditions improved, Gov. James Thompson said that he will apply to have the area declared a federal disaster area by Wednesday or Thursday. This would enable flood victims to seek low-interest repair loans as well as other federal relief programs.
”We`re in the process today and tomorrowof cataloging the damage,”
Thompson told reporters Monday during a visit to the Illinois State Fair in Springfield.
It will be the second time in less than a year that Thompson has been forced to seek disaster status after flooding in northern Illinois. Hundreds of current flood victims were also were hit last fall, when days of steady rain sent the Des Plaines and Fox Rivers spilling over their banks, causing $40 million in damage.
Joint assessments by inspectors from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Illinois Emergency Services Disaster Agency and the Small Business Administration will determine whether the area is eligible, said Charles Jones, director of the state disaster agency. Three 15-member teams were in the field Monday, he said.
Inspectors from the Cook County office of the state disaster agency
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”went door to door” with residents in Brookfield Monday, said Mark Isackson, administrative assistant to the village manager. ”We directed them where to go.”
About 100 homes in Brookfield were flooded by sewer backups or by floodwaters from Salt Creek, Village President Pierce McCabe said. Most of the homes were in the village`s northeast corner.
McCabe said village workers and volunteers were dealt a major setback about 4 a.m. Monday when Salt Creek, swollen further by overnight rains, broke through a sandbag dike in a flooded neighborhood along Forest Avenue.
Sunday night`s storm was a violent one, with wind gusts of up to 60 miles an hour. It brought another 2.75 inches of rain at O`Hare International Airport and temporarily knocked out electric power and phone service for thousands.
”We`d been doing pretty well pumping the streets,” McCabe said. ”Then the rain came along and just took care of our dike. The water flooded everything we had taken care of before, and we ended up in worse shape than when we started.”
And some residents of Brookfield, still trying to get rid of the water that had overflowed Salt Creek on Saturday and Sunday, expressed concern Monday night when officials of the Western Golf Association announced that their plans for playing this week`s Western Open at the flooded Butler National Golf Club in Oak Brook depended on pumping the floodwaters into the creek.
That kind of thing often happens to downstream communities, frustrated officials from those communities said.
”As one area pumps out, they add to the flood problems of their neighbors downstream,” said Barbara Rumsey, a spokeswoman for the
Metropolitan Sanitary District. ”It happens all the time, and there is not much you can do about it. The water has to go someplace.”
Across the Des Plaines from Brookfield, Riverside Village Manager Chet Kendzior said the worst problems were along the riverbank on the west side of town. About 80 homes there are affected by flooding, he said.
”Nobody can really do any cleaning up until the water starts receding,” he said. ”We`re getting things organized so we can get in to clean up as soon as the water recedes.”
Kendzior said the overnight rain hampered cleanup efforts in Riverside as well. ”We got 2 inches in about 45 minutes,” he said. ”Rather than slowly receding, the water just stalled.”
From Thursday night to Monday morning, 12.84 inches of rain had fallen on the Chicago area. A record 8.98 inches fell during the first 13 hours, from 9 p.m. Thursday to 10 a.m. Friday.
The month`s total rainfall exceeds 13 inches. With two weeks left in August, another downpour or two could push the monthly total past the record of 14.17 inches set in September, 1961–and the forecast for the next few days calls for showers and thunderstorms Tuesday night and early Wednesday morning. Elmhurst`s widely flooded southwest side suffered a second blow in Sunday night`s storm, when lightning knocked out power. That shut down the sump pumps of homeowners who had escaped flooding up to that point, and with their pumps not working, they joined the list of flood victims.
Two sewage-treatment plants serving Elmhurst and Villa Park, knocked out by Friday`s storm, continued Monday to pour raw sewage into Salt Creek. Officials said there was no serious health threat, although the plants are not expected to be back in service until later in the week.
Residents of other hard-hit suburbs were beginning to see the cement at the bottom of the basement by Monday afternoon. Joe Cosentino, 37, of River Grove, was one of them. The nine feet of water in the basement of his Cape Cod home facing River Road had dropped to four feet, though a workbench still floated freely and a washing machine had been pushed onto a basement sink by the water.
”I think I`m going to stick it out for a year and hope people forget about all this and then try to sell it,” he said. ”The mayor ought to get together with everyone and buy the whole damn block, unless the engineers can assure us that nothing is going to happen any more. There is no sense for people to live in an area like this.”
Of the 15 Du Page communities hit hardest by flooding, only Carol Stream had filed a damage assessment report as of Monday. Matthew A. Auriene, administrator of the Du Page office of the state disaster agency, said its estimate of $3.9 million in damage was ”one of the smallest” he expected to see.