Eleven-year-old Amanda Krueger, wearing a “Don’t Bug Me” sweat shirt and wielding a yellow screwdriver, deftly dismantled pieces of her bedroom, which had been awash in fetid water just a few days earlier.
She had a deadline. She was determined to move back into her flood-devastated Orland Park home by the time school started next month. Even more than her parents, Amanda was bent on recapturing her pre-flood life through sheer dint of effort.
Her contribution lasted only a few hours. By that evening Amanda, who suffers from asthma, began wheezing from the tainted, moldy air. Even outside, the fishy stench was more than her lungs could handle.
Nearly hospitalized, Amanda has been barred from going anywhere near her home until reconstruction is complete, weeks or even months from now.
A week after the sky split open and historic rains cascaded across northern Illinois, hundreds of families are just beginning to discover that the flood not only destroyed homes, furniture and mementos, but also forever altered the flow of their lives.
Dan Skwarczek, who lives across the street from the Kruegers, grasped the magnitude of the changes ahead when he pulled apart his flood-damaged walls this week–only to discover snakes slithering between the studs.
The cold splash of reality hit Alice Camareno, who lives next to the Kruegers, when she realized that insurance would not cover her family’s motel bills while they rebuild their home.
The death toll from last week’s flooding was low–two. But all across the region–in Aurora and Plainfield, Shorewood and Naperville, in the Fernway neighborhood of Orland Park where the Kruegers live–the flood is bringing painful and unexpected changes.
College funds, carefully scraped together over hundreds of paychecks, are being drained to pay for temporary housing and repairs. Plans for home additions and vacations have been swept away.
Mothers who found a way to stay home with their children are being pushed back into the job market, forced to plug gaping holes in the family finances. Working people, for the first time, are accepting charity, grateful for the gift of clean socks.
All told, the deluge–which merited a federal disaster declaration Thursday–will cost hundreds of millions of dollars.
Around the world, flooding is nature’s most common way of reasserting its control over human dominions. Viewed across the millenniums, over the vast expanse of northern Illinois’ clay-lined plains and marshes, flooding is inevitable, even predictable.
But in the rush of human time, floods like the one that destroyed hundreds of homes last week hit far enough apart to be forgotten. Each one is followed by new efforts to engineer the danger away, with wider drainage pipes and deeper retention ponds.
And so it was easy for the Kruegers to stand in the Fernway subdivision in 1985 and see not a flood plain, but the back yard of their dreams.
Kurt and Debbie had been married several years and Amanda, their second child, had just been born, a year after Jessica. “We were living in an apartment and had been looking for the perfect house for some time,” Kurt said.
“Then we found this place by accident and we walked in the yard and that was it. We called the Realtor and said, `Make the deal.’ We didn’t even have to go inside.”
At the time, the Kruegers didn’t worry much about flooding. Later, even though Kurt would see pictures of the home in previous floods, he could never convince his wife that they should sell. Two more children came: Toni, now 8, and David, 4.
Living in Fernway was worth the risk. All the neighbors felt that way.
“I could live pretty well anywhere in Orland Park that I want to at this stage in life,” said Bob Palucki, whose house is a few blocks away. “But I want to live here. The people here are probably the friendliest in Orland Park. They are good, hardworking, blue-collar people who get up every morning and go to work.”
Palucki bought his house in 1967, five years after the last of the 357 ranch houses that make up Fernway was completed. The one-story homes were built on the same floor plan, sided in brick or aluminum, and originally sold for as little as $10,000.
Palucki was president of the Fernway Improvement Association by 1973, when the group negotiated its annexation into the village of Orland Park.
That was just a year after a flood ruined several homes in the subdivision. But in those days, on the eve of the south suburban population explosion, the flow on the minds of officials was tax revenue, not rainwater. The long finger of developed land known as Fernway, flood plain and all, was a strategic addition to the southeast corner of the village.
Fernway flooded again after heavy rains in 1981. Some officials declared it a 100-year flood, the kind that only happens once in a lifetime. Nonetheless, the devastation spurred several flood-control projects, including a retention pond in adjacent Tinley Park that was supposed to give flood waters a low place to go.
“They told us with the new retention area in Tinley Park, there was no way (Fernway) would flood again–well, no way until the next time,” Palucki said.
Meanwhile, young families continued to move into Fernway, with its affordable homes, nearby school and neighborhood feel. It was a place where neighbors didn’t bother to knock and the older girls in the subdivision baby-sat for free.
More Top Picks Best Benchtop Band Saws
Just six weeks ago, Alice and Ray Camareno moved next door to the Kruegers, into their dream home. After years of living on the Southwest Side of Chicago, the couple craved a place where there was no graffiti, no worry about neighborhood gangs.
Alice had finally quit her grocery job and was looking forward to spending time with Michael, the youngest of her three children. Ray had just taken a job managing a garage-door business. It was all coming together when the flood hit.
“I had five boxes in the front room left to unpack, and I had spent $106 getting all the carpet cleaned and Scotchgarded,” Alice said. “Now it’s all in the dumpster.”
A few days after the flood, the Camareno children saw their gutted home for the first time. Twenty-month-old Michael played peekaboo through pieces of plywood that once held living room walls.
His 13-year-old sister Nicole looked in the front room window and turned away. “It’s not my house,” she said. “I swear, it’s not my house.”
“It hit me when I went to apply for a small-interest loan,” Alice said. “I thought, another bill? We just moved in, we can’t handle another bill.”
Alice said that she may soon end up back at work as a cashier, if it will leave any money after day care is paid for. She looked at the half-torn-out kitchen and muddy floors. “This is my job, taking care of the house, and I don’t have that anymore.”
“I don’t break down unless I’m alone,” she said, “and I haven’t been alone since the flood.”
Her neighbors to the north, Jennifer and Mark Raymond, also homeless since the flood, had no idea where they and their two children would live after money for motels ran out.
For Jennifer, a visit to the food pantry proved too much to handle.
“I was standing in line and they are giving me soup cans and I’m thinking, what am I going to open it with?” she said with tears in her eyes.
Unlike the Kruegers, who quickly stripped their home of everything the flood waters touched and were prepared for the professional cleaners by Friday, the Raymond home still bore touches of its former life.
Mauve wallpaper and an elaborate dried floral spray hung on the living room walls. To-do notes and drawings stayed pasted to the refrigerator doors.
“The girls keep coming back to the house and thinking that it will all be the same again,” Jennifer said. “There’s just so much to do.”
The Fernway families comfort each other by talking about how much better their homes will be. The Kruegers’ small sandbox will be rebuilt into an “Olympic-sized” sandbox. Debbie will be able to rip out the wood paneling that always seemed so dark.
By midweek, Debbie Krueger seemed to realize she could not outrace exhaustion–physical or emotional. After lining up an apartment for her family and shuttling between the flat and the storage bin, she felt so drained she could barely drag herself to the doctor’s office.
Alice Camareno will never look at her neighborhood the same way. “Before, I only really knew Kurt and Debbie,” she said. “This stuff is so hard to deal with, but it also brings you a lot closer than you’d ever know.”
So far, none of these families has decided to move. Even if they wanted to, Kurt Krueger wondered, who would buy the house after a flood like this?
Solutions don’t come easily.
The most obvious answer would be to dig a new hole big enough and low enough to hold Fernway’s excess rainwater in times of flood. But Fernway is surrounded by Tinley Park on the east and south, and Orland Hills on the west–communities that have their own residents to worry about.
Or, instead of looking big, Fernway could look small. Palucki, a former plan commissioner for Orland Park, thinks the village should buy a few of the lowest-lying houses in the subdivision, tear them down, and dig retention ponds specifically for the neighborhood.
The only problem, as Amanda Krueger would point out, is that those are not just houses–they are homes.