Battling back

On Aug. 23, Mother Nature threw everything she could at the village of Mount Prospect.

Rain, high winds, flooding. Falling trees snapped power lines, darkening homes, silencing sump pumps, refrigerators and air conditioners. Businesses shut and restaurateurs tossed spoiled food.

Despite all that, the village, its people working together, gave back as good as it got.

This is their story.

Devastation

Village Manager Michael Janonis, who lives on the north end of town, said even residents struggled to grasp the magnitude of the event.

"I don't think that the people on the north can necessarily appreciate what happened in the center of the town and vice versa."

Janonis lost power and some branches at his home. "I took my wife out on Friday morning." First they looked at the north end. "She said, 'Man, we really got nailed.' "

Her opinion changed when she saw the damage on Lonnquist Boulevard in the center of town.

"She said, 'This is incredible. We were lucky.'

"People at the south end of town, or even in the middle of town, didn't know that we were also dealing with the Des Plaines River coming out of its bank."

Mount Prospect's response to the storm was a coordinated effort involving every phase of government. "We had to very strategically marshal our forces," Janonis said.

Sudden impact

The storm hit Mount Prospect at 3:14 p.m. Thursday, Aug. 23, like a punch in the stomach.

"There was no concern at that time from the National Weather Service that we were going to get hit with anything," said Fire Chief Michael Figolah. "There were no alerts out there. There were no severe thunderstorm warnings. There were no tornado warnings for our area."

Indications of a possible tornado near Elmhurst and Bensenville, however, prompted Northwest Central Dispatch to set off warning sirens at 3:17 p.m.

Village employees headed for the basement. Power eventually was lost at both village hall and the police and fire department headquarters, but both buildings were able to gain backup power.

The sirens went off again at 3:34 p.m.

"Ours was not an F1. It was not a tornado," Figolah said, referring to alert levels. "It was a straight wind" -- estimated at between 70 and 90 miles an hour -- "which was much more wide and broad than a tornado."

Cries for help

Calls poured in: People were trapped in a house on which a tree had fallen and they couldn't find their father; a tree falling on a car near Lions Park School, trapped a family inside.

Deputy Fire Chief John Malcolm took over fire communications because Northwest Central Dispatch -- which takes calls for more than a half-dozen communities -- was overwhelmed by the call volume.

At 4 p.m., village officials activated the emergency operations center, located in the police and fire building downtown. Workers from various departments staked out territory, equipped with phones and laptops.

The center ran through Sunday afternoon.

"This was the nerve center. I think it functioned really well," Janonis said.

Employees got to know firsthand Tom Janetske, the village's emergency management coordinator, who was hired in February.

Coordinating action

The village was able to take most of the calls over from Northwest Central Dispatch.

"At any given time, we had about 40 to 60 calls piled up, stacked up here," Janetske said. Each department had a representative. "This way, as a unified group, we could discuss our issues and our topics that needed to be addressed." Departments also had two-way communication with field operation teams.

The center was fielding calls from 911, the police desk and other channels and tracking reports of trees and wires down, as well as structural damage. It was sharing information with public works and ComEd.

The village sent out teams of employees and citizen volunteers from the Community Emergency Response Team program who had been trained to identify hazards and concerns.

By 2 a.m. Friday, the village had established its first incident action plan and mobilized personnel to work 12-hour shifts. Goals included providing shelter to people with flooding or power issues or those who couldn't stay home alone because of disabilities or medical issues.

Mayor Irvana Wilks signed two disaster declarations with Cook County, one for the storm and the other for flooding.

Water works

Perhaps the department with the biggest challenge was public works, which had to battle on multiple fronts.

"This whole thing started for us with the river," said Public Works Director Glen Andler. Even before the storm, the department had been monitoring the Des Plaines River for weeks.

At 4 a.m. on Monday, Aug. 20, "we actually had to go out there and start pumping." Given the flood projections up to Aug. 23, "We felt that if we could just stay there, we would be able to handle it by just pumping."

With Thursday's power outages, however, problems multiplied.

"All of our water supply wells went out except for one," he said.

Fortunately, the village gets water from the Joint Action Water Agency, which delivers water at full pressure. And the village was able to get a second well going with a natural gas booster pump.

The water supply was safe, but water disposal was an issue. Two of three lift stations shut down, creating flooding from the sanitary sewer system. A generator was used to get one going, but the other flooded because of a sump pump failure, wiping out the pumps.

The village's relief stations also failed, causing flooding in homes. The village did, however, get them going again with generators. It obtained six in the middle of the night from Sunbelt Rentals on Busse Road. "They were fantastic," Andler said.

Tree-age

At the same time, Andler's department was sawing up trees to get the roads open.

"We were trying our best to keep up, and at some point there was no way we could handle it, so we finally just put out three end loaders and our three backhoes and started pushing debris out of the street and onto the parkway."

By 5 a.m. Friday, Aug. 24, emergency vehicles could get through all streets.

"It wasn't necessarily a straight route. But at least you could get through."

Rolling on the river

But by then, the public works department had to attend to the river big time.

"We thought that the river was under control, because we had the pumps out there and the projections were OK," Andler said.

Then the forecast was revised, calling for the river to crest higher than in 1986 by 1 a.m. Saturday, Aug. 25, which gave the department less than 24 hours to build a wall.

In 2004, "it took us 30 hours to build that wall -- and 75,000 sandbags. Of course, then, we had two- to three-day notice. We had to come up with a different idea of how we were going to do this. So, we came up with the idea of the jersey wall" -- a necklace of concrete barriers draped in plastic and plugged with about 15,000 sandbags.

Help pours in

Andler called Martam Construction Inc. of Elgin at 5 a.m. "and he just doesn't know the word 'No.' "

By 7 a.m., equipment operators arrived, by 9 a.m., sand, and by 10 a.m., the jersey walls. Residents followed.

"Those people were so supportive. 'When do you need us? I'll start spreading the word. When should we show up?' If we had to do it with just our personnel and Prospect Heights, it would have been a hard task."

Volunteers from the Great Lakes Naval Station came, as did a group of youngsters.

By 7 p.m., the wall was finished. "People were still out there at 7:30, 8 o'clock, throwing sandbags up. (We said), 'We don't need any more.' They just looked at me, and they just kept going."

The brush off

Meanwhile, Forestry/Grounds Superintendent Sandy Clark was organizing the tree removal effort.

The village hired three private firms to assist and also utilized mutual aid agreements with other public works agencies. They gave the village the use of equipment at no charge, except for out-of-pocket costs. Six communities offered help: Antioch, Buffalo Grove, Cary, Crystal Lake, Libertyville and Vernon Hills. Wheeling brought in an aerial truck.

New reports of damage were continuing to pour in Tuesday, Clark said. "Our phones rang off the hook all day today."

Spreading the word

For those who weren't checking the village's Web site or reading the newspaper, the village used town crier methods to get storm information out.

"We have little displays in restaurants all over town, because people are still frequenting the restaurants and the coffee places and the park district facilities," Janonis said. "I know Trustee (A. John) Korn walked a good chunk and handed out probably hundreds" of fliers.

On the beat

Many of the traffic lights were out of power. "There were about 15 major intersections that we needed to provide traffic control for," said Deputy Police Chief Michael Semkiu.

Police handed out information to residents, controlled traffic along River Road, patrolled neighborhoods looking for problems.

On Sunday, Aug. 26, an officer was driving down Wa-Pella Avenue at 2:48 a.m. and saw smoke coming from a house. He found a fire in the utility room, entered the home, woke an elderly couple and their daughter, and led them to safety. Police logged 651 overtime hours.

Hook and ladder

By Monday morning, Aug. 27, the fire department had made between 400 and 500 emergency runs, said Fire Chief Michael Figolah.

"At any given time on the first day, we had 65 or 75 emergency incidents that we could respond to."

Eight poles with high-power lines were lying across Dempster Street. Initially, there was no way to get emergency traffic from the center to the south side of town, where most of the problems were. A Pace bus got buried in the mud.

Trees fell on a 50-car garage at the Mansions of Mount Shire, taking off the roof and damaging about a dozen cars.

"I responded to that one, because I was on my way in, and I couldn't get from the south side of town to the center of town. 83 was closed. Emerson was closed," Figolah said. "It's amazing that as bad as the winds were and as much damage as there was, there wasn't anybody injured or killed."

However, a man helping his neighbor start a generator died of a heart attack.

Coming together

Two six-story senior living buildings were without power for days, which meant the elevators weren't working. "They had the most amazing attitude. … They invited us to a party when it was all over," said Mount Prospect Mayor Irvana Wilks, who toured the area with a ComEd official.

Citizen volunteers, trained by emergency management coordinator Tom Janetske, formed eight two-person crews to look at every house and walk every block. "These citizen volunteers … were phenomenal," Figolah said.

Janetske himself stayed on the job despite the two trees that fell on his house and a generator that burned out.

Community development workers scouted for structural damage and made sure the food being served in restaurants was safe, said Community Development Director Bill Cooney.

Finding shelter

Mount Prospect's Human Services Department was in charge of providing shelter. Director Nancy Morgan checked out hotels only to find all in the area were without power or did not have vacancies. Randhurst was used as a cooling center.

Brighton Gardens, a senior living facility in Prospect Heights, took in three people.

River Trails Park District Executive Director Debbie Carlson and her sister drove from Mundelein to open up the Rob Roy clubhouse and Morgan acquired cots from the PADS program with the help of former Mayor Gerald "Skip" Farley and Trinity United Methodist Church. But some cots were ruined when the church basement flooded. Holy Family Hospital contributed bedding.

"So we were prepared at Rob Roy for the hordes that never arrived," Morgan said. "People do not want to leave their home. We had a house with an elderly couple with a tree through the roof as a missile, with the rain pouring in. They absolutely refused to leave."

Documenting cost

The Finance Department is playing a pivotal role in documenting the costs. Director David Erb initially kept his department operating with lanterns and flashlights from Costco, which opened early the day after the storm.

"We are putting together a binder," he said. "It's got two sections. One is going to track all the expenses for the flood event. One is going to track all the expenses for the storm event. When the time comes to submit for a possible reimbursement, we (will have) all the detail and all the backup."

Looking back, Janonis said that to a large extent the village was lucky in how well the recovery effort fared. But, as Mount Prospect Trustee Arlene Juracek said, "You make your own luck."

In the end, Janonis said, "It was really kind of inspiring at some points to watch this thing happening. Everybody doing their job and everybody cooperating."