Homes, businesses await service, cleanup goes on
Chain saws ripped into tall trees sprawled over streets, cars and homes.
Pumps pulled dark water from dank basements.
Traffic signals surged again to life.
But repairing the stunning damage from Thursday's awe-inspiring storms is not a one-day task.
Today, frantic residents along creeks and rivers will stack more sandbags and watch the water rise -- inch by inch. Thousands will stumble through darkened homes and warn children to be careful as they sightsee on bikes.
Branches and trees will sit on soaked lawns.
Much work has to be done before the storm everyone wants to forget becomes the one we all remember.
Most pressing: Tens of thousands of homes and businesses will still have no electricity today and the rapidly rising Fox and Des Plaines rivers are threatening to swallow even more homes and roads.
On Friday, state officials declared Cook, Lake, Kane and McHenry counties disaster areas, freeing up tax dollars and equipment to help bail out villages and cities swamped by traffic jams, power outages and flooding.
"This is the worst I have ever seen it," remarked Mount Prospect Mayor Irvana Wilks as she eyed two cockeyed electric poles that dropped their lines onto small trees off a busy road.
Many will swear a tornado must have touched down to create such damage, but weather experts say there were no twisters.
Yet, the aftermath seems to speak for itself.
The string of storms Thursday afternoon and night dropped more than 2.3 inches of rain, shattering the previous one-day record of 1.92 way back in 1885.
The buckets of water fell on already saturated ground and overflowing rivers. Tamer storms exacerbated the washout Friday.
The wind Thursday was as powerful as a tornado, nearly 100 mph in spots, tossing old trees just as easily as branches and throwing wood fences into the air.
The one-two punch stopped nearly all activity as people just stood and stared.
Planes couldn't take off at O'Hare International Airport, leading to more than 520 canceled flights and delays Friday of more than 45 minutes. Cracked crossing gates and trees covering tracks delayed scores of Metra trains hauling commuters home.
More than 600,000 homes and businesses went dark at some point during the storms Thursday. By late Friday more than 150,000 were still without power, most in the Northwest suburbs. A few thousand still had no power in the West suburbs.
Exelon chairman Frank Clark asked customers for patience as crews travel from as far away as Texas to help with repairs. He said it will be "several days" before all the lights are on in the suburbs. Clark said he couldn't be more specific.
"This is a massive outage," he said. "We will just methodically go through until we get all the customers back."
As power comes back on, the frustration and problems for residents near the Des Plaines or Fox rivers are just starting. Water from a drenched Wisconsin is still making its way downstream and it will only push the water lines farther up roads and into homes.
Despite the chaos and sense of danger in the air -- stay out of flooded roads and away from broken power lines -- many suburbanites reached out to help set things right again.
Neighbors pulled extension cords across streets, lent a hand to saw dead trees and worked together to sandbag.
At work, at the grocery store or standing on the block, acquaintances gasped over the destruction and struggled to recall if they had witnessed such a storm before.