Why streets still flood after project at Carol Stream park

After completion of a $12.5 million project to relieve flooding around Carol Stream's Armstrong Park, neighbors were left wondering: Why are the streets still under water after heavy rains?

More than a year ago, DuPage County began building a system of pumps and reservoirs on the south end of the park. County and village leaders will explain how it all works during a ceremony at 9:30 a.m. Oct. 14.

But they're already stressing the design is intended to protect nearby homes from flooding and not to keep roads in the neighborhood clear of standing water.

It would have taken a "much, much larger" reservoir than what was built to keep water off the streets, said Anthony Charlton, the county's stormwater management department chief.

"Quite honestly, it just wasn't practical," he said.

During heavy rains, Klein Creek overflows near the park. The village, for the past five years or so, has "aggressively removed obstructions from the creek to try to improve the flow as much as possible," Village Manager Joe Breinig said.

But the neighborhood around Armstrong Park was built in the late 1950s and early 1960s, before the village established standards on storing stormwater, Breinig said. As a result, there's no easy engineering solution for the flooded roads, he said.

"There was no stormwater detention. There were no stormwater ordinances," Breinig said in response to questions about the county's project during a forum Wednesday night on the State of the Village. "We've learned. But those homes - and I grew up in one - were built without storm detention, so as a result ... the creek rises, it reflects up through the drains. There's really not much we can do to change that."

Save for a few software glitches that the county's employees overrode remotely, the system at Armstrong Park operated smoothly during the last storm a couple of weeks ago, Charlton said.

Now, when Klein Creek swells, rising waters spill by gravity over a wall into one of two reservoirs at Armstrong. As many as two pumps will go live automatically, triggered by sensors.

Every minute, the pumps will push tens of thousands of gallons of water from the smaller reservoir into a bigger one. Then the water will flow into 60-inch siphon pipe under Illini Drive, Indianwood Drive, Thunderbird Trail and, finally, a new swale that empties into downstream Klein Creek.

"It's a lot less water than it used to be, but there will be water out there," Charlton said of the streets. "But the main goal is to keep water out of people's homes."

With that work complete, the park district will improve the recreational amenities at Armstrong. The KidsWorld playground, built in the late 1990s, will be replaced with a new one expected to open next May. Nearby walking trails also will be resurfaced in the roughly $300,000 project.

"Unfortunately, like anything it's seen better days," park district Executive Director Jim Reuter said of the current KidsWorld, a wooden structure that should be demolished later this month.

The county has repaved some of the trails, and the park district will do the rest after an engineering study, Reuter said.

LED lights will be installed by the inline skating rink, which also got a new coating.

"It had a lot cracks and the lines were a little bit off, and it's very popular in town, so we thought it was important to do that," he said.

At the earliest, baseball players could start using the ball fields in fall 2016, Reuter said, but the "real target is probably spring 2017," so new grass can take root. "Then it's easier to maintain for us," he said.

Those ball fields also will continue to flood "and always will," Reuter said.

"It's designed to take on that water so that some of the residents don't obtain water in their yards," he said.