A flood of memories

Brookfield has flooded many times since its earliest days in 1889. Even then there were flooded cellars and basements. Unpaved mud or gravel streets, after a long or hard rain, became ponds and small rivers, especially in the area along Salt Creek.

The creek’s water level was usually low, and rose only a foot or two after normal rains. A big, sustained rain temporarily added many feet to its shallow depths. If no rain fell for a week or two, people could take off their shoes and stockings, hitch up their trousers or skirts, and walk across the creek at certain points. Local people knew by habit where these safe crossing spots were.

If it rained enough, the creek overflowed its banks and turned Kiwanis Park into a lake forest. It still does this today.

Salt Creek got its name from being flooded back in the springtime of 1838, when John Reid of Oneida, N.Y., tried to go across the creek in Addison, carrying a load of salt to Galena.

He misjudged the crossing spot, and the wagon was upset by the strong flowing waters. The salt dissolved away, and Reid told about it. Soon, people began referring to the creek as the Salt Creek. Thus, it was a spring flood that gave the creek a name other than the Little Des Plaines River.

Ogden Avenue was laid over with 8-foot wide planks, and called the South Plank Road, which lasted for about 10 years, from 1848-1858. But since the planks were just laid without using nails on the wooden “rails” directly on the ground, a flooding rain often floated away whole sections of the road.

Early Grossdale was subject to many floods, even on its streets away from the creek. Crossing muddy, puddly streets was done by the most primitive of ways, by simply laying wide long boards across the roadway. Intense rains caused these boards and sections of the wood sidewalks to float away, like rafts.

One of the first well-documented floods in Brookfield occurred on Saturday, Aug. 9, 1924. The Suburban Magnet newspaper for Aug. 16 reported about Salt Creek that “Our peaceful winding stream looked like the Missouri River in the flood time. Bathing suits on the kids is the proper costume, and the olders are wearing hip boots as they walk around their yards, or rather, ponds.”

This familiar scene was next echoed on Thursday and Friday, March 18-19, 1948, when a torrential rain flooded the village. Snow had fallen in early March, and ice had glazed the frozen ground. So when the rains came, it was not absorbed into the ground, but just created ponds and lakes.

“Salt Creek Goes Over Banks on Friday Evening,” was the Magnet headline for the March 25 issue. Rains continued to fall at intervals through Sunday, March 21.

“More than a thousand telephone calls in 24 hours were turned into the Public Works Department,” the article stated.

Ted Dreher of the department stated that “the flooding we got took everything we had in the way of equipment to handle, and even then we couldn’t do the job as it should have been done.”

Late that Sunday and early Monday the creek level was receding, but basements were still full, especially those in houses on Forest, Vernon and Sunnyside avenues as well as Grand Boulevard. Some of the basements on Forest Avenue filled up with water to the first floor.

Brookfield Village Manager James F. Shurtleff explained that “the problem is a matter of having sewers to carry off the water, which seems to be what is lacking in Brookfield. The village is pretty flat, and if the sewers carried the water to the creek, or to larger sewers, it should clear, but as it is, the water backs up and there is no way to get it out. But sewers, no matter how much they might cost, would have done very little good in the driving rain Thursday and Friday.”

Unanswered was the question as to how helpful good sewers would have been against the creek overflowing its banks. Some people used pumps to remove the water from their basements, but the water was refilling them as fast as they were pumped. The basement of the Youth Center in the Brookfield Kindergarten building at 3601 Forest Ave. was completely filled with water.

Residents of basement flats had personal items, food and furniture destroyed. In the aftermath, evidence of flooded basements was easy to spot along alleys. In Congress Park “the personal belongings of young and old, beyond the point of salvage, were mixed in with furniture, rugs, food and clothing.”

A few lesser floods followed in the years between 1948 and 1969, when the next big one hit. It was a hot and humid summer, and residents settled down to sleep on July 16, 1969. Around 4 a.m. the next morning, flashes of lightning and blasts of thunder woke everybody up. Then came the heavy, continuous rains. Cracks in basement walls began to show trickles of water. At first, the sewers were handling it, but the rain came down harder and harder.

After an hour or two, basement lights began to turn on, as water came in. Streets became ponds, and then rivers, and residents with pumps struggled to keep their basements dry. Families pressed their sleepy children into service, moving what they could up out of the basements. Heavy items such as dryers, washers and television sets were left floating.

In the morning, people were unable to go to work, as their cars were swamped, their tops looking like little islands on the street.

“Where is all the water coming from?” asked residents, shaking their heads in wonder even as the sun finally broke through the gray clouds. Canoes, rowboats and rubber rafts were the new form of street transportation, and the favored form of pedestrian travel was barefoot.

At the Brookfield Zoo, the polar bears were nearly free as birds, as their deep moat filled up, and they could swim away whenever they wanted to. Brookfield firemen nervously pumped out the water while zoo personnel stood by with rifles.

In its 1969 “Brookfield Report,” the village alleged that “the flood could not have been prevented, even with [new] storm sewers,” and that sewers were clogged with tree roots and debris. “Funds simply were not there to the proper job of cleaning.”

Afterwards, a better sewer cleaning and a catch basin repair program were begun, using additional village and state income tax money.

“But don’t expect miracles,” the village warned.

On Monday, Sept. 29, 1986, in the mid-afternoon, the skies blackened ominously over the southwest suburban area. Tornado intensity winds hit Brookfield, accompanied by much lightning and extremely heavy rains. Electric power went out, phone service was disrupted, and then came the flooding.

Just a few days earlier, on Friday, Sept. 26, a huge rain had fallen. The ground was still waterlogged, the creek was still fairly high, and sewers were still recovering.

Then came the big Monday storm. Brookfield’s Public Works’ men filled and lined sandbags against the creek, along Forest Avenue and south of Washington Avenue.

But the water spread over most of Forest Avenue, and made a lake on the front lawn of 3518 Forest Ave. To make matters worse, on Friday, Oct. 3, an additional 2.3 inches of rain splattered down on the well-soaked and soggy village. As usual, residents cleaned out their flooded basements.

The Metropolitan Water Reclamation District’s Deep Tunnel Project was only in its first phase and couldn’t do anything about flooding. Residents relaxed a little in the knowledge that this flood had been a freak occurrence, a once in a “100-year rain.”

Ten months later, on August 13-14, 1987, a 10-inch rain again began to take its toll on the creek. While the deluge came down, people watched their basements, remembering last October’s storm.

Then, early the next Monday morning, a second heavy rain of 2.5 inches reduced streets alongside the creek, such as Arden and Southview avenues on the south end, and Forest and Prairie avenues on the north, to 4- and 5-foot deep lakes.

Some residents were made temporarily homeless, while others fought the waters with sandbags and pumps, trying to save their homes and the items inside. All over the village, kids splashed and enjoyed the lakes that were once streets.

Calling in the Illinois National Guard became a serious option. Some backyards on the 3600 block of Forest Avenue were under four feet of water. Flooding health tips were published in the local papers, as well as sources for home owners to receive federal relief.

Homeowners were told to take photos of all damage and to make monetary estimates of the losses. But not all homeowners were reporting their damage, even to village officials.

“We might be coming close to 300-400 homes that were flooded. We have so many people who don’t report losses to us; they just go to their insurance companies,” said Brookfield Building Director Charles LaGreco.

Besides homes, one public building, the Brookfield Post Office on Prairie Avenue, had its basement filled with 3.5 feet of water. Several personal items belonging to mail carriers were water-logged.

Village President Pierce McCabe explained the problem of housing being built on floodplains, which has, in the years since, become a well-known problem relating to storm drainage.

People sloshed through the streets, threw out water-damaged articles, and were not happy about Mother Nature throwing at them the second “100 year rain” less than one year later.

The summer of 1988 was a hot, dry one, with yellow lawns parched for lack of water, since lawn sprinkling bans had been enacted. Recalling the floods of the previous years, Brookfield residents were not amused by the irony of it all.

In the spring of 1989, the Deep Tunnel Project came to the village, and was especially noticeable in front of the Grossdale Train Station Museum on Brookfield Avenue.

Since then, there have still been flooding problems, especially along the creek, a natural floodplain. But to get to the Deep Tunnel and its reservoirs, the rainwater must first go through the sewers, which can only move so much water at a time.

When completed, the tunnel and underground reservoirs will hold 15.6 billion gallons of water. Which is certainly better than seeing it all in the streets, or in basements.