In what is being called a unique flooding event, a stretch of Lake-Cook Road in Northbrook remained flooded more than a foot deep for three days last week.
The flood, between two of the three entrances of Northbrook Court shopping center, showed up mid-day Wednesday, July 12, and disrupted traffic until Saturday morning.
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“That location on Lake-Cook Road is not one where we’ve seen flooding before,” said Kelly Hamill, Northbrook Public Works director, on staff since 1999. “Actually a river gauge is right there (in the Middle Fork of the North Branch of the Chicago River), and that water there was reported higher than the gauge had ever read.”
He said the water rose to about 13.5 feet, eight feet higher than it had been shortly before the rain started to fall the night of July 11.
“Wow,” said former Village President Mark Damisch via Facebook July 14. “That is something. I don’t ever recall that happening even when the underpass was full in 1986,” he said, referring to the flooding of the Cherry Lane underpass west of Meadow Road that heavily-flooded year.
Hamill said that he thinks that Lake-Cook’s unusual flooding this July was a result partly of the rain flowing down from more heavily-saturated Lake County and southern Wisconsin, and about 3.75 inches that fell in Northbrook itself.
Water collected on that stretch of Lake-Cook Road normally flows into the Middle Fork, and then into the Northbrook Court reservoir, south of the mall. But when the reservoir filled Wednesday, “it reached the same level as the (Middle Fork) river, and it equalized,” so water had nowhere to flow naturally, Hamill said.
The road had been flooded for several hours July 12 before it was closed to through traffic between Waukegan Road on the east and Skokie Boulevard on the east. Traffic had been allowed into the area through Waukegan Road, as drivers were permitted to squeeze around barricades to proceed to subdivisions in Norrthbrook, Highland Park and Deerfield and to the million-square-foot shopping mall.
Access from the eastern, Skokie Boulevard, side had been shut off from late July 12, Hamill said, because drivers were coming in from the east and then trying to circumvent the lake in the middle of Lake-Cook by heading south on Lee Road and other streets that don’t go through, and getting lost in unfamiliar territory. But Northbrook Deputy Police Chief Roger Adkins said on July 13 that after talks with the mall and officials from other villages, it was decided to let cars come in from the eastern, Skokie Boulevard side, as well as from the west. That change came about 2 p.m. the afternoon of July 13.
The street had been flooded for hours before it was officially partially closed the previous day. Hamill said drivers were allowed to try to get through the flood the best way they could, until the decision came to restrict their travel.
Some of the drivers had stalled in the pool, said Kristin Anunson, general manager of the mall.
She said that all of the stores in the mall opened on July 13, and shoppers were getting in — just fewer of them.
She said that emergency personnel “had done a great job,” and the mall’s only qualm with their work was completely closing the eastbound side of Lake-Cook at Skokie, forcing miles of detour for shoppers.
“Our biggest concern is the safety of our customers, and the drivers on Lake-Cook Road, and that they are comfortable,” she said.