Like nearly everybody else in the Loop on Tuesday, Rose Triplett came to work. And then she, like most, went home.
”I called first, but I couldn`t get through,” Triplett said after security guards turned her away from the still-dark Executive House hotel where she works as a maid. ”I figured I better not take a chance.”
Hoping to salvage the trip, she then went shopping. But with a dimly lit, generator-powered Walgreens the only store open for blocks, it wasn`t long before she ended up back at the Metra tracks, carrying two bars of soap and a lot of frustration.
”I can`t work, I can`t shop, there`s nothing open,” said Triplett, a South Side resident. ”I`m just going home again.”
For thousands in Chicago, Tuesday was the workday that wasn`t. The corner coffee shop was closed; so was the favorite lunch spot. Roaring generators attached to huge hoses belched murky water into the streets. Phones, lights and heat were turned off. Stoplights were out, parking garages were dark and trains stopped short of downtown, forcing commuters onto shuttle buses.
Those who were smart stayed home.
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For those who did make it in, only to find their buildings closed by flooding or power outages, it was a day of lost wages, lost time and lost tempers, fueled in part by a round-trip morning commute.
For others, who found the doors of their jobs open, it was a day of unusual challenges.
Sean Walsh, a risk control officer for First National Bank, spent Tuesday morning carrying his fax machine, a phone and a box of pens down 13 flights of unlit stairs, then waiting in a long line for approval to move them to another unaffected building.
”We sweat, we get the runaround. It`s like normal,” he joked while in line in the dark lobby at 22 W. Madison St.
Nearby, at the Amalgamated Bank, 100 S. State St., tellers were working by the oddly romantic dim light of mismatched desk and floor lamps, which employees said had been filched from the offices of executives in the building.
”I hate to say it, but they`re kind of enjoying it. It`s an adventure,” said Martin Davis, the bank`s senior vice president, who had forgone his pinstriped suit for bluejeans and a walkie-talkie.
”I may not look like it, but I am,” he said of his title.
Tellers, stripped of their computers and bundled up against the chill, were reduced to working with pen and pad and the occasional calculator, giving the bank a rather quaint anachronistic air.
”Everybody`s getting a refresher course in math,” said Tracy Powell, one of the tellers, as she tallied figures.
Commonwealth Edison Co. officials predicted Tuesday that power would be back on to most affected areas north of Washington Street, except for the Marshall Field store, by rush hour Wednesday.
Many of the 53 buildings to the south, between Washington, Adams and Dearborn Streets and Michigan Avenue, could be off for a ”couple more days” because of more severe flooding there, said Donald Petkus, an Edison vice president.
Field`s flagship building, hit by some of the most severe flooding, due to a direct access to the flooded tunnel, will be closed well into next week as repair efforts continue.
More than 300 Edison workers in the Loop were busy separating feeder lines to flooded buildings from those to buildings that had escaped damage. The task was an effort to restore power as quickly as possible to as many buildings as possible. About 200 Loop buildings lost power Monday; ones without water will get service first.
Analysts estimate downtown businesses will lose $80 million to $106 million for every 100,000 employees out of the office for a day, and stores on or near State Street will lose $1 million to $1.5 million for each day they are closed by the flood. Nearly 4,000 workers at Field`s, Filene`s Basement and Carson Pirie Scott will be laid off without pay until their stores can reopen.
Water was receding in many flooded buildings, including the Chicago Board of Trade, where a pump failure earlier Tuesday had caused the water level to temporarily rise, said Fire Commissioner Raymond Orozco.
Phone lines, even those in the flooded tunnels, were relatively unaffected by the flooding Monday and Tuesday, phone companies said.
But requests for installation of temporary lines to makeshift offices were up, along with the volume of calls, many from ”business people calling each other to see what was going on,” said Thomas Hopkins, an American Telephone & Telegraph Co. spokesman. On Monday, the company handled 155 million calls to Chicago, the fourth-highest number in its history.
Tuesday, the city`s court reporters were wishing they would get one of those calls to find out what they were supposed to do.
Locked out of their regular office and away from their transcription machines, the reporters passed the morning with a box of doughnuts and coffee at their makeshift headquarters, a long marble bench commandeered in the lobby of the Daley Center.
”We have no idea what we`re going to do,” said Deloris Gray, a South Side resident and one of about a dozen women waiting for word from their supervisors.
”They may come down with pencils and papers and tell us, `Here,`
” added Judy Dziewior of Hinsdale.
While waiting for the day`s assignments, they tried to figure out what to do for lunch, noting that both the McDonald`s across the street and the State of Illinois Center`s food court were closed by the flooding.
”There`s no good place to go-unless you want fish,” quipped Dziewior, who had heard of alewives swimming in the State of Illinois Center`s lower atrium.
Elsewhere in affected areas of the Loop, would-be workers peered unhappily through dark windows of office buildings and pleaded with the flashlight-carrying security guards inside to open the doors.
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”We`ve got all our files up there, our payroll. I have to go up there,” argued John McGowan, president of McMarketing Services, with the security guard at the Carbide and Carbon Building, 230 N. Michigan Ave.
The guard was unmoved, even when the company`s vice president, Jennifer Tio, produced her own flashlight and a bag of batteries.
”I could have called, but I was being optimistic,” said Tio, who gave up and returned to her Lincoln Park home without the file she needed for a meeting Wednesday in McHenry County.
The few shoppers traversing the Loop, meanwhile, said they hoped things would get back to normal Wednesday.
”I always go to my favorite place for coffee, and it`s closed,”
complained Connie Sandstrom of Flossmoor, who instead was haunting the dark-but-open Fannie May candy store on Wabash Avenue.
”I`m tired of all the pumps,” she said. ”I`m anxious to see the people back.”