WTTW: Climate change isn’t just creating stronger hurricanes and melting polar ice caps, it’s also increasing urban flooding here in Chicago with neighborhoods like Chatham bearing the brunt of this phenomenon.

The South Side community experiences a large amount of flooding made greater than its counterparts on the North Side because of a lack of preventative infrastructure, which can cause significant damage to homes and businesses.

An initiative led by Argonne from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Urban Integrated Field Laboratory is helping the residents of Chatham build a future without a regular threat of flood damage by using scientists and supercomputers to figure out why flooding is so prevalent in the area.

The $25 million project was launched in 2022 and will span a total of five years.

As part of the initiative, Chatham residents are invited to contribute their experiences to the development of an app that tracks rainfall and flooding events in real time, giving people immediate access to weather data tailored to their area and helping them prepare for future storms.

“I’m a daughter of Chatham. We had four major flood events, two of which triggered electrical fires and we had smoke damage throughout the house,” said Nedra Fears, executive director of the Greater Chatham Initiative.

Fears says her story is not uncommon. Many of her neighborhoods have had similar incidents also happen to them.

“The reality is that the sewer system can’t handle the overflow of rain and is backing up into our basements,” Fears said.

Extreme weather events are happening more frequently than previous decades, bringing an increased risk of inland flooding, according to research from Argonne.

And the Great Lakes region is particularly affected by climate change with alternatively rising and decreasing lake levels increasingly becoming a threat to shorelines. 

Chicago’s neighbor, Lake Michigan, has seen an uptick in strong winds and heavy storms.

“Urban flooding is devastating. FEMA had been designed for mostly riverine flooding and now even FEMA is re-focusing on urban flooding,” said Catherine O’Connor, director of engineering for the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Greater Chicago (MWRD). “They see the devastation, they see the heartbreak, they see the terrible expense to residents. MWRD, FEMA, federal and local governments are all taking a closer look.” 

Chatham has some low-lying and depressional areas, which may contribute to the flooding issue.

MWRD is working with the city to create more green spaces to combat the issue of flooding, but nature and climate change prove a difficult challenge.

“Nine inches of rain in 12 hours — there’s no system that can handle that. What we need for that is adaptive management, so we need to make sure that things are off the floor in the basement [when it storms]… We want to be flood resilient,” said O’Connor, who points to the agency’s Green Neighbor Guide as a useful tool.

The project focusing on Chatham, which is being conducted under the umbrella of a center called Community Research on Climate and Urban Science, will finish up in 2027.

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