On Aug. 16, Residents that lived near or in the City of Chicago or Cook County were terribly affected as there was widespread flooding and infrastructure impact alongside areas such as the northern and northwestern suburbs, the western and southwestern suburbs.
According to Cook County Illinois, there were over 5,500 reports of damage to homes and damage to businesses throughout Cook County in areas such as Berwyn, Cicero and Mount Prospect that were the hardest hit.
The thunderstorms were moving in through Wisconsin from the southeast bringing strong winds of 60 mph. According to CBS News, “Strong storms with wind gusts of up to 60 mph began moving into northern Illinois from Wisconsin around 3 p.m.”
If the thunderstorms were that strong. Then it begs the questions: What caused these thunderstorms to be that horrible.` where they also had to continue on for three days in a row?
Based on how the weather was before the thunderstorms happened, it shows that due to atmospheric conditions across Chicago like humid hot air creating rising air masses that developed into towering cumulonimbus clouds.
According to CBS news, the thunderstorms were really bad. It stated, “Kamil Seremak said his girlfriend called him to tell him the roof had been torn off and when he got there, water was pouring down into the building’s hallways.”
The thunderstorms had water seeping into buildings all over Illinois, including some of the parts of H-F’s building.
According to Jim Patterson, the Director of Operations, “With the amount of rain we received in such a short period of time, we did experience a few areas that allowed water in,”Patterson explained, “We never want to have water damage in any of our buildings, but a storm like that really allows us to see any hidden deficiencies that we may have and allows us to get them identified and repaired.”
The buildings in H-F are monitored probably every five days of the week by observing and planning on what they would fix in the buildings, so the buildings won’t become run down and dysfunctional because of any natural causes.
After all of this, the thunderstorms ended, it caused damage to multiple houses and to many neighborhoods in chicago.
