Storms bring flooding to Chicago area, more severe weather expected

State transportation officials were cleaning up water Saturday on U.S. Route 41 near Lake Bluff in Lake County, with the road closed from routes 137 to 176, according to the Lake County Sheriff’s office.

When Lake Bluff resident Kris Rosiak looked outside his home around 6 a.m. Saturday, he noticed the overnight storms had flooded his yard.

“Our house was basically an island,” Rosiak said. “A lot of our neighbors got basement damage.”

His home is on the near west side of Lake Bluff, just east of Green Bay Road and west of the train tracks that divide the east and west sides of town.

It took a couple hours for the water to recede, Rosiak said, and some roads were still flooded and closed, including the viaduct that goes under the Metra train and connects residents into the downtown business area.

“It’s like a 14-foot clearance and the water’s all the way up to the top of that,” Rosiak said. “It’s still closed at this point.”

His son, who was awake until around 2 a.m., saw it start to rain, he said. But the torrential storms, thunder and lightning came around 4 to 5 a.m., Rosiak said.

“It looked like buckets were pouring,” he said. “Looked like it was raining sideways as well. It came down in a hurry.”

Rosiak’s basement didn’t get too damaged, though water did get inside and soak their carpet, he said. He saw neighbors with worse luck Saturday morning, pulling furniture and carpeting out of their basement.

“The storm sewers just can’t handle it,” Rosiak said. “We see this with big rains quite frequently, unfortunately.”

Strong storms seem to be happening more frequently, Rosiak said.

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“We’re having this over and over again,” he said. “I don’t know what the town’s doing about it. Doesn’t seem like much. But again, it just seems to be on a more frequent occasion and we just seem to keep getting lucky.”

Friday night’s storm worked its way out of the Chicago area and into central Illinois and northwest Indiana, said Zachary Yack, meteorologist with the National Weather Service. Another storm was headed toward Chicagoland from southern Minnesota and Iowa on Saturday,

Any area from around Interstate 80 in the south suburbs of Chicago and out to Gary, Indiana, north to the Wisconsin state line, is “fair game” for where the wave of thunderstorms coming southeast from Minnesota and Iowa might hit, Yack said. That storm will also bring damaging winds of up to 70 mph winds, he said.

“Also another round of torrential rainfall,” Yack said. “And also there’s a chance that we could see a few tornadoes here and there as well later on this evening and into the early part of the overnight hours.”

The worst of it is expected to reach the Chicago area in the evening and through midnight, with possible storms building up behind the main storm system and continuing to bring rainfall into tomorrow morning and possibly early afternoon.

Yack said people should be on guard and have multiple ways to receive warning alerts.

“It’s important to make sure you have ways (to get) warnings that can wake you up in the middle of the night in case we issue warnings overnight while you’re sleeping,” he said.