Help is on its way to Oak Lawn homeowners who have had to deal with flooded streets and basements over the years.
High School District 218 will allow the village of Oak Lawn and the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Greater Chicago to build a detention basin in the fields near Polaris Intermediate School, at 107th and Kilpatrick Avenue.
More than 6,600 feet of storm sewers also will be replaced with larger pipes, ranging in size from 30 inches to 5-feet in diameter, according to the MWRD.
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“What this project is going to do is alleviate a great majority of that flooding for these residents when we have these major storms,” said Village Board member Ralph Soch, who represents the 6th district of Oak Lawn, where the improvements will be made. “I’ve lived in that district in four different houses in 50 years and I’ve seen and lived with the flooding that goes on in that area.”
Because of the way the water drains, other areas also will benefit, said Village Manager Tom Phelan.
The District 218 School Board in March voted unanimously to approve the project, even though only two of the board members are from Oak Lawn, Phelan said.
“They recognize the importance of this to the community,” Phelan said.
Village officials said the project, which has been in the works for more than 15 years, is another step in their years long effort to address flooding problems in Oak Lawn.
The MWRD had an engineering study done of the area between Pulaski and Cicero avenues and 103rd and 111th streets, which concluded the optimal way to reduce flooding would be to increase the capacity of the storm sewers, combined with building stormwater detention in the park.
The storm sewers will be sized to handle normal rainfalls. When larger storms with heavier rain happen, the water would be diverted to the park, which will be excavated about 6 or 7 feet below grade, MWRD officials said at a community forum March 6.
Phelan said the village expects between 12 million and 20 million gallons of rainwater and storm runoff could be temporarily detained once the detention system is built. The water then will gradually be released into the storm sewers.
“Within 24 hours after a storm, this water is all going to be released and the fields are going to be in better condition they are now,” Soch said. The park has baseball, soccer and football fields.
Depending on how full the basin and the downstream sewers are, the water typically drains from the detention basin in 18 to 48 hours, said Joe Kratzer, civil engineer with the MWRD.
During and after a heavy rain, no one would be playing on the fields anyway, Kratzer said. Perforated pipes under the ball fields can help them dry out faster.
“You’ll have a better field all year long,” Kratzer said.
Oak Lawn officials said more than 700 people responded to a community survey about the project, with 93% approving of it.
District 218 Superintendent Josh Barron said he is in favor of the project because he was told it would help homeowners in the area and not negatively affect the fields.
“And it’s not costing the district a penny,” he said.
Barron visited a similar drainage project the water reclamation district did at a Mount Prospect park near the Des Plaines River and heard positive feedback from a resident who lived nearby.
Polaris Park is not the home field for any District 218 high schools, Barron said, but is used for practice, when other school fields are not available and by other groups.
The engineering firm the village hired estimates the project will cost about $12 million, which will be split between Oak Lawn and the MWRD. Exactly how much each will pay has not been determined.
The Oak Lawn Village Board in March approved C.M. Lavoie and Associates’ proposal to prepare the engineering and landscape plans, work with the various agencies involved and perform other services for a price of $393,000.
“The cost sharing for the remainder of the project will be more defined as we continue to refine engineering design and the Intergovernmental Agreement between MWRD and the village of Oak Lawn,” the firm’s president, Christopher Lavoie, said in an email. “At this point, School District 218 will not be involved in cost sharing,” he said.
MWRD expects the work will take more than four months to complete with work done from the spring to fall of 2024.
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Kimberly Fornek is a freelance reporter for the Daily Southtown.