The monotonous plopping sound that filled Doris Doorn’s Tinley Park living room could be heard all across the Chicago area.
“It’s been drip, drip, drip all day long,” Doorn said as she watched water trickle through her living room ceiling into a bucket-a scenario likely in homes throughout the region Tuesday.
Just as January’s pipe-cracking chill meant round-the-clock shifts for plumbers, Tuesday’s thaw had roofers climbing the wall with hammers and chisels in hand.
“It’s been crazy,” said Tinley Park roofer Harold Mastra. “People who haven’t had any roofing problems in 10 years, all of a sudden, boom.”
The unexpected thaw produced a multitude of mixed blessings:
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– It meant relief for frost-heavy trees, but it also raised the danger of another malady-snow mold, the pinkish white stuff that results from a quick thaw after a long frost and can kill grass.
– It meant a chance to wander outside and break cabin fever, but it also meant dodging a bumper crop of new potholes on the roadways.
– It meant relief from an oppressive winter, but it also raised the danger of local flooding from a too-rapid meltdown.
Just the melting snow and slush already was enough to flood some streets in Lake County, where in Mundelein crews took to the roads to free clogged sewer lines.
Elsewhere, there were plenty of leaks to plug and holes to fix.
Sharon Warnecke, secretary for Albe-Warnecke Roofing Inc. in Naperville, over the past two weeks has fielded hundreds of calls from homeowners with frozen gutters.
“I feel like I should make a recording on the answering machine,” said Warnecke, who on Tuesday was weathering water seepage in her own Aurora home. “I have to keep telling people the same thing: More or less, there’s nothing we can do until it thaws.”
A few days ago, Tinley Park’s Doorn was convinced that she had the winter blues beaten. The 53-year-old had just returned home from two weeks in Florida, to temperatures a good 30 degrees milder than when she left at the end of January.
But Monday night, she noticed a suspicious line in the ceiling of her year-old condominium. She had a hole drilled in the mark and struck water, from snow melting through her roof.
“We’ve filled six buckets already,” said Doorn, who was lucky enough to escape with her living room intact.
Others were less fortunate. Curtis Narducci, 29, of Arlington Heights said his $4,000 remodeling job on his girlfriend’s home, where he also lives, was ruined by water leaking from the roof. The living room paint was stained and blistered, and the basement, littered with pots and pans, was flooded.
“We have indoor swimming now. We have an ice-skating rink in the sun porch, and we had an electrical blowout,” Narducci said.
A roofer already has estimated the repair will cost $4,000. “It’s a nightmare,” Narducci said.
And so it has been on area roadways.
“I’ve been involved in maintenance operations for nearly 30 years, and this has probably been one of the worst winters . . . and spring breakups I’ve ever seen,” said Duane Carlson, area chief for the Illinois Department of Transportation.
State crews are installing protective wood sheeting underneath 35th Street in Chicago where it crosses the Dan Ryan Expressway after a dangerous incident last Friday. A chunk of concrete fell off the overpass, shattering the windshield of a car passing underneath. The motorist suffered minor injuries.
The good news is that with warmer weather forecast for the rest of the week, pothole repair crews can start filling in the thousands of potholes that have appeared on local thoroughfares.
The thaw also means good news for countless birch and evergreen trees, whose tired limbs have had just about enough of holding up all those pounds of ice and snow.
“The weight is gone,” said Meegan McCarthy-Bilow, a horticulturalist with the Chicago Botanic Garden in Glencoe. “That’s good. It’s a relief for them. You’ll have less breaking of branches.”
But, alas, all things in nature are a balance.
“You have a potential to see more incidents of snow mold,” McCarthy-Bilow said. “Once the moisture is gone and the weather changes, so goes the snow mold.”
The question, however, is whether that mold goes away before it discolors your lawn.
The thaw shouldn’t affect your garden, though “perennials can’t get heaved out of the ground” from the freezing and thawing, McCarthy-Bilow said.
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The flood of sunshine and melting snow brings a massive cleanup job, as well as an inevitable question: Why the sudden change in the weather?
According to forecasters, the jet stream has been responsible for pounding Midwesterners with gusts of arctic air for the past two months. But a shift in the stream, to the Pacific Ocean, has brought relief from one of the most brutal winters in years.
Temperatures could soar as high as 58 degrees by Friday, but don’t pass the tanning butter just yet, officials say. Rain is in the weekend forecast, which, combined with the snow and ice melt, could cook up a whole new weather problem: Flooding.
“With the snow melt and runoff and possible rain on Friday, those ingredients could add up to some local high water,” said Steve Toci, a meteorologist with the Central Weather Service.