Flood wall stirs up controversy in Des Plaines
A 600-foot-long hole in a roughly 2.5-mile floodwall being erected along River Road in Mount Prospect as part of Levee 37 has stirred up controversy in Des Plaines.
Levee 37 is a roughly $28 million U.S. Army Corps of Engineers project to prevent flooding in neighborhoods west of the Des Plaines River in Mount Prospect, Prospect Heights and a portion of unincorporated Cook County.
The floodwall is being built along the east side of River Road and Milwaukee Avenue stretching from Euclid Avenue to Palatine Road.
Des Plaines leaders are worried those towns would sandbag the 600-foot gap shut in a heavy flood forcing water south into Des Plaines.
The gap is meant to be left open until a compensatory storage area is built upstream to hold the displaced floodwater from area communities. The reservoir would be in Wheeling's Heritage Park, 2.3 miles away.
"If they filled in this gap with the wall, it would be an additional one inch of water to residents of Des Plaines in a 100-year flood event," Des Plaines Mayor Marty Moylan said.
None of this should come as a surprise to Des Plaines residents since Levee 37 has been in the works for decades, Mount Prospect Mayor Irvana Wilks said.
"If there were no wall, we would still sandbag," she said.
Wilks said she expected Des Plaines leaders would support the building of Levee 37 just as her community supported construction of Levee 50 in Des Plaines.
"We do not mean to cause our neighbors in Des Plaines any distress," Wilks said. "When a state of emergency is declared, municipalities are allowed to protect their residents and businesses with sandbagging. It is nothing different from what we've done for 20 years."
Mount Prospect Village Manager Michael Janonis invited Des Plaines leaders to sit down and air their concerns face-to-face.
"The bottom line is we've all been at the table for many years and now this has become a big issue and nobody from Des Plaines has picked up the phone to call us," he said.
However, Des Plaines leaders have been calling state legislators to push for the reservoir to be built sooner.
An agreement between the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District, Wheeling Park District and the village of Wheeling to build the 115-acre-foot reservoir is expected in October. MWRD has completed a preliminary investigation of the Heritage Park site and will begin design work for the reservoir once that deal is inked.
Still, completion of the roughly $25 million reservoir is nearly four years away, MWRD Executive Director Richard Lanyon said Thursday.
In a perfect world, the reservoir should have been built before Levee 37 construction began, he said. But the project was delayed because an earlier chosen site in Buffalo Grove fell through because an agreement could not be reached with the Lake County Forest Preserve District.
"We finally reached a point of desperation to look at another site, which was the Wheeling Park District, a couple of years ago," Lanyon said.
What delayed negotiations further was the unexpected finding of organic peat material in the soil at Heritage Park.
Lanyon said that could pose a construction problem and cost extra if the peat had to be hauled away so the agency struck a deal with the park district to provide an additional site in the park to dispose of the peat.
The agency also learned it will need to acquire three additional properties with homes right next to the park along Wolf Road south of Dundee Road to build the reservoir. That could turn contentious, Lanyon said.
In the meantime, Lanyon said Des Plaines residents will have to weather flooding problems just as they always have.
"It's difficult to say anything to ease their concerns because admittedly for this interval of a couple of years between the time the wall is completed and the reservoir is completed, there's going to be this increase in the water level," Lanyon said. "I don't know that another inch of water is going to make that much of a difference."