Downpours left basements, streets flooded all over North and Northwest sides, and some say it’s a recurring problem

CHICAGO (CBS) — Sheets of rainfall on Sunday overwhelmed the sewers and created wild images of water flooding viaducts and gushing out of drains like geysers.

On Monday, an intense cleanup was in progress. Meanwhile, CBS 2’s Chris Tye explored where the storms hit, the calls for service, and why certain neighborhoods get hit the hardest most often.

In Rogers Park, everyone who lives 1700 block of West Columbia Avenue – between Ravenswood and Hermitage avenues – ended up with water in their basements.

The rainy Sunday gave way there to a Monday of insurance estimators, industrial suction vacs, and people reflecting on how often this happens in the area.

Some say they have felt this same pinch four or five times in the last 10 years – and they say it’s getting old, wet, and tired quickly.

“The worst – for sure,” said Rogers Park homeowner Estelle Pizzo. “I’ve been here 25 years.”

Of course, anything bubbling over like a fountain in one’s home – short of an actual fountain – is unwelcome. But the last place anyone would hope for such a thing to happen is the toilet.

Guess what happened to Pizzo.

“It wasn’t just rainwater – it was sewage coming up from the floor drain and the toilet, which is – I’ve never seen it come out of the toilet before,” she said.

A total of 7 inches of rain fell in one hour in Rogers Park, sending that filthy water up through the toilets and grates. It rose nearly as fast out on the street in front of Pizzo’s house.

“The water came all the way up almost to mid-hubcap,” Pizzo said.

Meanwhile all over the North Side, water geysers shot into the air from city streets and metal sewer covers went flying. The deluge brought a perfect storm of so much water and an underground system that couldn’t keep up.

CBS 2 tracked the parts of the city where the rain fell hardest and fastest. They appear in the darker colors in the map below.

Those are also exactly the neighborhoods where calls to 311 for water in basements and water on the road — reflected in blue dots on this second map — came in most frequently.  

From Sunday to Monday morning, there were more than 900 calls from six Chicago community areas on the North and Northwest sides alone.

Portage Park had the most – with 343 calls about basement flooding and 31 about street flooding – for a total of 374. Edgewater followed – with 145 calls for basement flooding and 26 for street flooding – for a total of 171.

“You go through this and its maddening,” Pizzo said.

Adding to the madness for Pizzo is a fear that more new construction in her neighborhood will only add more stress to infrastructure system already tested to the limit.

“We have to get our systems to handle more extreme problems,” she said.

We reached out to a number of the aldermen in this area Monday. None got back to us. Neither did the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District, which manages the sewer systems.

Meanwhile, homeowners say after this round, the questions will be sharper – and the demand for answers will be a little more pointed.

We also dug into some more data. Believe it or not, when it comes to flooding, Sunday ranked eighth among the highest number of flooding calls ever.

The worst was July 24, 2010, when 311 operators received more than 3,000 calls for flooded basements or streets. That is followed by storms in 2013, and then 2011.