With Water Receding, Flooded Suburbs Still Face Major Cleanup
CHICAGO (CBS) -- As the flooded Fox River and Des Plaines River slowly recede after last week's storms, homeowners and businesses throughout the northern and northwestern suburbs face lots of repairs and cleanup.
On Linden Drive in Round Lake, piles of flood-damaged belongings laid curbside for village crews and front-end loaders to place into dumpsters.
Some of those items belonged to Annette Negrete-McGinley, who said her basement wound up with four feet of water last week due to the flooding.
"We lost the hot water heater, the furnace, the A/C, the washer-dryer, the bathroom that's down there, my home office, a living room, and then the crawl that had all our stuff … belongings, keepsakes that you kept in there," Negrete-McGinley said.
When the family realized water was coming in, her daughter put on rain boots, went into the basement, and tried to salvage some mementos.
"We formed like a chain coming up the basement, started what we could, as much as we could of those family mementos upstairs," she said.
Negrete-McGinley called her family's losses devastating, but said she knows other people who suffered worse than her family did.
Overall, Negrete-McGinley said she's been pleased with the response of Round Lake village officials after the storms last week.
"As you see, they're helping pick up the heavier stuff to get in the dumpster. They brought the dumpster for us," she said.
More rain is expected in the Chicago area the next few days. Although the storms should not be as heavy as last week, officials areas that flooded last week will keep a close eye on lakes and rivers that have started to recede, in case water levels start to rise again.
According to National Weather Service charts, some sections of the Fox River and Des Plaines River might not return to normal until sometime next week.