Residents of Chicago's West, Southwest sides demand action after being hit by flooding twice
Homeowners on Chicago's Southwest and West sides said one historic flooding fiasco this summer was bad enough, but then this past weekend, they were hit with a second.
Since Aug. 16, the city's 311 service request line received more than 5,600 calls for flooding.
One of the many people who experienced flooding was Sharen Renee Parish — who has lived in her Gage Park neighborhood for 24 years and had never experienced basement flooding, ever, until just past July 25.
That day, Parish found herself in knee high water after significant rain on July 25.
"Literally last night, I woke up coughing," said Parish.
That flood required two weeks of clean up and cost her a basement's worth of valuables gone. And then it happened all over again over the weekend.
"What hurt me the most is for an inspector to come out and say it's my, myself, the homeowners fault?" Parish said. "No, they're not hearing me. I'm not being heard. None of us in Gage Park are being heard. No one on the West Side of Chicago is being heard."
Parish heard that Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson was in her neighborhood surveying damage on Tuesday, so she marched up to him and tearfully asked for help herself.
"None of us have done anything wrong to deserve this," Parish told the mayor.
"No, you haven't done anything wrong," Mayor Johnson told her. "We don't control the rain. Like I said, the infrastructure the in our city has been in need of rain for quite some time."
It was a similar soggy scene in the West Englewood neighborhood where a homeowner also said the flooding was like nothing she has ever seen before. The video showed water inches high in a living area and a bathroom.
On Tuesday, Mayor Johnson blamed two factors for the historically severe flooding. The first was what he described as a water management system that was not properly built on the West and Southwest sides of the city, and the second was a need for better infrastructure to keep up with climate change.
Mayor Johnson said the only way the city can successfully tackle the mess is with state and federal funding.
"We've reached a point where it's going to require us to make those investments so this doesn't become, you know, the norm," Mayor Johnson said.
U.S. Rep. Jesus "Chuy" Garcia (D-IL) said on Wednesday that the state needs to file a formal request for disaster relief from FEMA so homeowners can get access to federal flooding relief funds.
"It's very clear that families on Chicago's Southwest Side, including other places, are suffering a disaster, and this calls for a disaster declaration to provide relief to the suffering families," he said
Affected residents received free cleanup kits in red buckets from their ward offices. Meanwhile, Mayor Johnson also called for state and federal government to provide emergency relief for homeowners and businesses.
"The harsh reality is that there was poor planning in the infrastructure that left Southwest and West Side families, working people, vulnerable," Mayor Johnson said. "And you know, as difficult as this is, and as much as we're going to work hard to provide support on the front end, there aren't just simple, quick fixes to this."
The city is asking anyone who was impacted to fill out the Chicago Flood Assessment Survey. The deadline for doing so is Friday, Aug. 22, at midnight.