When John Frey awoke from that fretful sleep a couple of weeks ago to the sound of all three sump pumps going in his home on Aurora’s West Side, he felt his heart racing and a sense of panic coming on.
I can’t go through this again, he recalled thinking.
Almost 30 years earlier Frey’s home was among thousands that were flooded when nearly 17 inches of rain fell in less than 24 hours across Aurora. And like most of us who were around at that time, he clearly remembers the devastation from the slow-moving system that stalled over Northern Illinois, making Aurora the epicenter of one of the most extraordinary weather events in Illinois history.
So it’s no wonder the recent Fourth of July weekend storm system that dumped roughly nine inches of rain on Aurora over a 48-hour period was enough to get hearts racing again.
What the National Weather Service described as a “significant flash flood event” earlier this month led to closed roads, flooded basements, power outages and downed trees. But it was nowhere near the scale of the storm that struck without warning around 11 a.m. on July 17, 1996, when – as one headline memorably proclaimed – “the bottom fell out of the sky.”
By the following morning roads around Aurora were closed, including parts of main arteries like Interstate 88 and Routes 47, 59, 31, 30, 56 and 25. Living in Wheaton at the time, I recall the arduous – at times scary – commute to the downtown Aurora newsroom.
Even more vivid were those hot and humid hours, days, even weeks that followed when our reporting staff ventured into water-logged homes throughout Kane, Kendall and DuPage counties that contained ruined furniture, appliances, photographs, family heirlooms – and at times, ruined lives.
I will never forget the quote of a young mother on Aurora’s East Side, who told me through tears of hopelessness and resignation, “I have lost all I ever had.”
Nor will I forget that first interview with Wayne Rogers, who needed the Aurora Fire Department to boat him out of his Lakeside Sans Souci neighborhood so he could fly to New York where, on the same day as this flood, Paris-bound TWA Flight 800 exploded above the Atlantic Ocean, killing all 230 on board, including his daughter Pamela Lychner and his two young granddaughters, Shannon and Katie.
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For Rogers, this Mother Nature disaster was but a footnote to a family tragedy the rest of us can’t even imagine. Yet his story also underscores just how extraordinary July 17, 1996, was for this entire region.
It was an event that had “lasting implications” in so many ways, noted Ald. Carl Franco, 5th Ward, who recalls his family spending that stormy night in their Alschuler subdivision basement – only to find himself “floating” on an air mattress when he awoke the following morning. Even more alarming, he added, was watching water bully its way through the cinder block wall “like a dam breaking.”
Franco, who joined the Aurora City Council 18 years later, fielded plenty of calls from residents “who were freaking out” as this recent storm pounded the area.
“People were traumatized from that flood of 30 years ago and it really never left them,” he said. “There’s still some healing to do.”
Dan Hoffman would agree.
The retired Special Operations sergeant with the Aurora Police Department sent his officers home early that night in ‘96 to take care of their emergency situations, only to find “all hell broke loose” after he returned to his own house on the corner of Downer and Manchester.
Watching water fill his basement and take over the main floor “was a sick, sick, sick feeling,” Hoffman said, adding that, after falling into an exhausted sleep in an upstairs bedroom, he awoke to find “our own lake house in the middle of our home.”
Interestingly enough, recalled now-retired WGN meteorologist and Aurora native Tom Skilling, WGN launched a new helicopter that morning, and the first video sent back to the station included floodwaters that, in some subdivisions, “were up to the second-floor dormers.”
Then-Aurora Mayor David Pierce also got a birds-eye view when the Illinois State Police took him up in a helicopter to survey the damage.
“It was an eerie scene … almost like you see in disaster movies,” he recalled. “It literally closed the city down.”
After getting a call at 4 a.m. that morning, Pierce said he had to rely on a street department truck to get him to the emergency operations center that, located in the basement of the old police station near the Fox River, required sandbags in the toilets to stem the flooding.
According to a news report, seven Aurora police cars became submerged in rescue attempts. Until the water receded, boats were required to get in and out of some of the city’s hardest-hit neighborhoods, including Cherry Hill, parts of which were later declared a floodplain by FEMA.
Those street scenes were certainly memorable — and at times heartbreaking, noted Hoffman, who remembers his wife in tears as the family’s piano was tossed onto a towering pile of waterlogged belongings that a bulldozer hauled away.
No wonder he was “on pins and needles for a long time” when leaving his house for any extended period. Nor is it a surprise that when Hoffman moved five years ago, he purchased a Sugar Grove home “in the highest point of Kane County.”
It was the “largest property damage disaster to hit the city … fortunately no lives were lost,” Pierce recalled. “It was a very trying time all the way around.”
According to reports from that time, bankruptcies, divorces, domestic abuse and mental health issues all appeared to be on the rise. People were pulled under financially by this deluge, especially those who learned their basic homeowner policy did not cover sewer backups, noted Pierce, who recalled about a third of Aurora homes had basement flooding, some of which involved mud and sewage.
But Aurora was not the only community that faced a flood of troubles from that massive 1996 storm.
According to Beacon-News reporting, Batavia, Plano, Yorkville, Oswego, Boulder Hill, Millbrook and Millington got 14 inches of rain. Naperville, which had 14 electrical fires in one night, received 12 inches; Elburn, 11; Big Rock 10 and Geneva, 9.
Everyone who lived in those areas at the time had stories: Desperate folks trying to get to hospitals to give birth or for dialysis; homeowners catching fish in their front yards; PADS residents helping motorists stranded in an impassable River Street viaduct; a Plano couple rescued by emergency crews from their rapidly disappearing front porch; an elderly couple walking into the bank and handing over the keys to their badly damaged home.
Certainly this weather assault changed how the community thought about flood control. Stormwater regulations got stronger, sewer line, bridge and culvert improvements were made, green initiatives sprouted up and flood forecasting and emergency responses got an overhaul.
But as one expert noted at the time, with that kind of rainfall, there’s simply no place for so much water to go.
“Flood disasters,” Pierce told me, “are the most frustrating because there’s little you can do but watch the water rise.”
For the most part, the Federal Emergency Management Agency came through, providing $152.9 million in assistance to nearly 7,000 Aurora residents, according to Beacon-News reports. But the real heroes of these stories are the residents themselves who pulled together in a time of crisis.
Frey, for example, will not forget the man next door who drywalled and painted his basement.
Hoffman had at least “30 people tearing up my house,” and a firefighter buddy who “rebuilt it” at no cost.
Strangers became friends, in some instances, even best friends, recalled Tom Thill, who helped a neighbor get her elderly mother out – then went back into the flooding home to retrieve stashes of hidden cash.
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There were plenty of surreal moments, he admitted, including the Cherry Hill neighborhood turning into an ongoing party as people continued to gather in the streets with “sandwiches and six packs” in the many weeks of cleanup.
Those 16.94 inches of rain in Aurora “remains the single heaviest 24-hour Illinois rainfall on the books,” said meteorologist Skilling, whose own parents were stranded for days in their Prestbury condo that “ended up on what amounted to an island in the midst of a sea of flood water.”
The deluge, he reminded me, resulted in $600 million to $700 million in damage to the region (well over $1 billion in today’s dollars), making it the second most expensive flood in Illinois history.
“It was a devastating rainfall,” Skilling said, “and remains a rain tally without peer in Illinois.”