Chicago floods!

The near-record setting rain Chicago received on May 17th resulted in flooding of streets, basements, and even entire communities.    These floods occurred because the City of Chicago sewer and Deep Tunnel systems were unable to keep up with the flow of water.  The Chicago Tribune reported on May 19th that most of the systems had reached their 1.2 billion gallon capacity prompting city engineers to even reverse the Chicago River to help mitigate flood waters.

Unfortunately, the fact that the systems put in place by City of Chicago engineers were unable to mitigate flood waters means that many of our properties experienced flooding, affecting basements and some garden apartments. These spaces become vulnerable to flooding when the City’s and region’s systems become overwhelmed, and there is not much that can be done in those circumstances beyond repairing the damage after the flood waters have receded. The floods affected many other properties throughout the city as well, and coverage of the widespread flooding has been pervasive in local print and broadcast news; even Willis Tower staff and tenants were forced to evacuate the building when downtown flooding caused a power outage

While we are constantly evaluating additional measures that can be taken to reduce the damage from flooding, we recognize that situations like this are disruptive to affected people’s lives. We apologize that this happened to some of our residents and are working with those tenants to restore their apartments to its pre-flood conditions.

May rainfall has been record-setting, making this a difficult period of time for many property owners and managers. Hopefully, future rains this summer will not cause such a severe back-up of the systems that the City of Chicago has in place.  

Additional videos of the May 17th, 2020 floods:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zel0U_6_hKc

https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/environment/ct-heavy-rains-sewage-chicago-20200515-4rxpjn7hargw3avja6igpvwgxu-story.html?fbclid=IwAR19ZGZ4lmNLOpE64WKxiNDTue9HTsB5U8U1za_eJm7FAK8Q5uD4F-9mpvk

https://grist.org/climate-energy/this-video-of-a-sewer-geyser-in-chicago-is-utterly-nuts/