New Storms Hit Flood-Soaked Illinois Areas

New thunderstorms hit flood-soaked northeastern Illinois on Sunday, two days after a record downpour caused the Chicago area’s second major flood in a year, and hundreds of people remained in shelters.

Water receded in some areas to the north and northwest of Chicago, enabling homeowners to start cleaning up mud and repairing damage, officials said. But the western suburbs had to keep bailing out as runoff gorged streams.

“It’s just backing up in the streets because it has nowhere to go,” said Tom Mefford, deputy coordinator of the Du Page County Emergency Services Disaster Agency. “We’re closing down some roads because of rain right now.”

Use Rowboats on Streets

He said volunteers used rowboats and motorboats to travel flooded streets in some western Chicago suburbs to rescue any residents still stranded in their homes.

Hundreds remained in temporary shelters in Du Page and Cook counties two days after a storm swamped the area with 9.3 inches of rain, the heaviest 24-hour rainfall in 100 years of keeping records.

Sunday’s storms, accompanied by high wind and some hail, were expected to dump up to an inch of rain on the area, National Weather Service spokesman Len Whitcomb said.

But Whitcomb said forecasters believed that Salt Creek and the Des Plaines River would continue to recede in the western suburbs.

By Sunday afternoon, Salt Creek had fallen 2.1 feet below its flood stage of 7 1/2 feet at Rolling Meadows, northwest of downtown Chicago, officials said. The Des Plaines River also was receding, but it remained 3 1/2 feet above its flood stage of six feet in the western suburb of Riverside.

American Red Cross assessment teams estimated that 3,025 homes were damaged by water, and 1,025 of them sustained major damage, with at least four feet of water in the basement or four inches on the first floor, spokesman Fred Sabine said in Chicago.

Damage assessment teams made up of state officials and members of the Federal Emergency Management Agency announced that they would tour the area today to inspect damage. If federal aid is granted, it probably will take the form of low-interest loans for repairing property damage.

Clean Up Tornado Damage

In Minnesota, dazed residents cleaned up the remains of their cabins on Eagle Lake in the aftermath of a tornado Saturday that killed one person and injured seven others, one of them critically.

“It looked like a white sheet coming across the lake and then you could see the twister behind it,” said Audrey Eichstadt as she helped a neighbor pick up debris from the twister in west-central Minnesota. “There was absolutely no warning.”

Five cabins were destroyed and at least three others damaged by the tornado at the lake, about 20 miles east of Fergus Falls and 170 miles northwest of Minneapolis.

The area had been under a tornado watch, but weather service forecaster Lou Bennett in Fargo, N. D., said that no tornado warning was issued before the twister struck because it had not been reported or sighted on radar.