Des Plaines History Center set to reopen after flood damage

Five weeks after a mammoth flood hit Des Plaines and most of the Chicago area, staff and volunteers at the Des Plaines Historical Society are still struggling to recover.

And while they plan to have the Visitor Center open 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 25, for a "Day of the Dead" kids event that is their part of the Halloween Hoopla that they co-sponsor with the Des Plaines Park District, Chamber of Commerce and Library, they are warning that the Kinder House will probably not be decorated for Christmas this year.

"It's not looking good for our Holiday Gala at the Kinder House on Nov. 30," Joy Matthiessen, Des Plaines Historical Society executive director, admitted. "No final decision has been made, but we may just have our cookie sale in the Visitor Center.

In September, the society's History Center, three buildings in the downtown area which are only a few blocks from the river, all had flooded basements which left the four full-time and three part-time staff members scavenging for volunteer help from members of the community and groups like the Maine West High School football team.

"I have been here 19 years and we have never had anything this disruptive hit us," Matthiessen said.

The worst flooding occurred in the society's Visitor Center at 781 Pearson St. More than four feet of water poured into that basement through myriad old, unused pipes which suddenly became conduits, Matthiessen said.

The phones were out for eight days. The boiler had to be reclaimed and the water heater replaced. The electricity was out in parts of the building as well.

In addition, all of the drywall in the basement had to be removed and an environmental team was called in to assess the damage and clean it up to prevent mold from ruining archival materials stored in the building.

The Kinder House museum at 789 Pearson St. experienced an inch of seepage throughout the basement which ruined the carpet and forced the artifact processing facility to be relocated upstairs into exhibit space and away from potential mold contamination, she explained.

And the Fisher-Wright House at 815 Center St., which the Society uses as an auxiliary programming facility, got approximately five inches of water in its basement. Willed to the Society in 2002, it still contained many crates of things left by the former owners, which staff members had not had time to cull through.

The flood forced staff to identify and salvage potential artifacts left by the family and dispose of many worthless items like scraps of wood, coils of twine and boxes of wire, according to Matthiessen.

"Once you start the work, of course, there is always more damage than you think," she said.

"Years ago the basement of the Kinder House was just a big open meeting space," Matthiessen recalled. "But as the society grew and the use of the house changed, we turned it into an exhibit space and built walls on top of the carpet. That is the area that took the hit in the Kinder House and we had to remove all of those walls in order to get rid of the wet carpet."

"We are just grateful that no artifacts were ruined," she added. "Many of our artifacts are stored off-site at the Leisure Center, which was totally unaffected."

The historical society is still compiling cost estimates, and has no dollar number on the damage, Matthiessen said. It will be seeking to recover some of the costs from insurance and through the disaster relief effort being administered by the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Fortunately, the staff had been developing a disaster plan when the rains began. A staff member acquired a carload of the supplies they were going to need for the cleanup by traveling out of the immediate area on Sunday, Sept. 14, so they were ready to attack the problem first thing Monday.

"We had a little seepage on Saturday and were monitoring things and had pumps running," Matthiessen said. "But by Sunday we knew that we were going to be hit hard. The problem was that anyone who could have helped us was engaged in their own crisis elsewhere that day."