Nuclear plant's warm water used to melt ice on Kankakee River 50 miles southwest of Chicago
WILMINGTON, Ill. (CBS) – Residents along the Kankakee River in Will County, nearly 50 miles southwest of Chicago, are still dealing with the ice jam that poses a flooding risk to nearby properties.
Local emergency officials shared their plans to thaw out the river that's been jammed up with frozen ice chunks as far as the eye could see with the frigid temperatures this week. A flash flood watch was in effect until temperatures get above freezing and all the ice on the river fully melts.
The ice acts like a dam and it's forcing water to pool into people's backyards. Fingers of the river bloated and froze over onto neighbors' properties.
Allison Anderson, the director of the Will County Emergency Management Agency, showed CBS 2 one of the affected neighborhoods. She was out checking on homes on Wednesday and explained what the county was doing to help mitigate the flooding.
"All this ice is just coming stacking on top of each other and basically building bricks on top of each other like a big Lego set," Anderson said.
Workers are siphoning water from the Dresden Generating Station's cooling lake. The water in the lake is used to cool the nuclear power plant, but it's warm enough to melt ice.
Since before 11 a.m. on Wednesday, the county was pumping the warm water into the Kankakee River.
"It helps," Anderson said. "It doesn't prevent ice jams. It doesn't completely take them away. It's just one of the mitigation tools that we can use to try and help expedite the process."
She added it could be a couple of days before the warm water makes any noticeable difference on the river.
Until Mother Nature warms things up, the situation in Wilmington will be frozen and fluid.
"This just happened so fast and so quickly overnight this weekend just due to the arctic temperatures, we're just responding to it now," Anderson said.
The freezing temperatures that cause ice jams to form are expected to last at least until next Monday. The City of Wilmington opened up a sandbag filling station in the parking lot of city hall for residents to use to help protect against flooding.