This Isn't Good

It's not a police story, or even specifically a Chicago story. 

But it may affect homeowners and a lot of cops own homes:

• For the first time in history, Deep Tunnel, Chicago’s massive system of underground tunnels and reservoirs designed to hold flood water, is almost completely full after a weekend of heavy rain.

  Built over more than a half-century, Deep Tunnel sends floodwaters from Chicago and nearby suburbs through more than 100 miles of tunnels into three reservoirs located just outside of the city. It was designed to help protect area rivers as well as Lake Michigan.

  The Thornton reservoir in south suburban South Holland was at 94% capacity Monday. The McCook reservoir in southwest suburban Bedford Park fluctuated between 96% and 100% full. Between the two, they are holding around 11 billion gallons of water.

  The Thornton reservoir has never filled up much more than half its capacity and that was at almost 55% in June of 2019. The smaller McCook reservoir has filled up several times this year, most recently on June 26.

This mega-project has been going on for half-a-century. It has Rostenkowski's fingerprints all over it and has been a constant source of political and construction graft for most of it's existence.

But....it has provided some relief....actually, quite a bit of relief to homeowners in the area. We personally went through a couple bad basement floods back in our youth. It was an almost semi-annual tradition of emptying out the basement of waterlogged furniture, boxes of winter clothes, bins of destroyed Christmas decorations that didn't fit in the garage. Sometimes, the Ward boss would schedule a special pick-up day to pick up the alleys full of wreckage.

And then it slowed considerably. We moved to a neighborhood where it almost didn't happen at all. No one remembered the last time it happened it had been so long. But now, the reservoirs are full, the assorted municipalities can't empty them fast enough to make room for the next storm, and basement floods are suddenly on everyone's radar. 

Get those boxes up high and invest in plastic bins we guess.