As flooding worsens, the same Chicago neighborhoods keep paying the price

Flooding in and around Chicago is chronic. 

Yet the media coverage has been formulaic: A general assignment reporter is sent out to a devastated neighborhood to get a quote from a survivor or a politician surveying damage. Maybe there’s a line about climate change, but often not. 

For several years, I’ve thought about diving into the subject. I asked myself: Why do some parts of Chicago flood worse than others? Why are low-income Black-majority areas hit the hardest? What can be done? 

What I knew going into this project was that there are no simple or immediate answers. A great deal of money has been thrown at the problem and a whole lot of people are studying it. 

Starting strategy

To do my initial story and follow-on articles for the Health and Climate Change Reporting Fellowship, I knew that I had to devote a lot of time to historical research as part of my reporting. A number of people I interviewed assumed that a massive tunnel and reservoir system built over a half century was supposed to fix the problem. Experts knew that it didn’t.

But at the heart of the story are the survivors. I needed to allow enough days and weeks to track down as many people in communities as possible. And I always need to allow a great deal of time to listen. The residents believed the tunnel system was supposed to be a remedy for flooding. The truth is it was a fix but only to a certain extent.

My research also would require a lot of reading. My deadlines for the project were relatively short and I know that government bodies in and around Chicago can be particularly obstinate about responding to open-records requests, even though they’re obligated by law to do so.

I found reports I needed to start looking for clues. One in particular seemed to be hiding in plain sight. It was a plan Chicago submitted to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development last year. This 100-page document, an application for $427 million in funding, had some invaluable information. Once I started asking questions, it seemed like few people outside a handful of bureaucrats at City Hall had actually read the plan.

Finding a factual nugget 

As I read through the document, a single sentence jumped out at me.  

“Chicago's infrastructure is designed to handle up to 2 inches of rain within a 24-hour period, a benchmark exceeded twice in less than six months,” the document explained. It was written in the context of two devastating storms in the summer of 2023.

That detail was stunning to me. Chicago and its suburbs had received 8 to 9 inches of rain in short periods of time in 2023. We have a sewer system that is built to handle 2 inches of rain and we’re getting more than four times that amount? 

That detail had to be teased out in the first few paragraphs of my story. It helped establish the overall narrative: Chicago suffers from more intense storms, exacerbated by climate change, because politicians and planners haven’t adapted to the changing environment. 

The built environment

That built environment — more and more concrete surfaces and an aging sewer infrastructure in the most disinvested communities — started to show me the true reasons that flooding is so awful in my city. 

My reporting took me often to the West Side but also to the suburbs and the South Side, which has long been known to suffer badly during floods.

The story also led me to planners and engineers and other experts who see the world through a much different lens than most of us. It was a conversation with one such regional planner that helped me find a lead anecdote for one of my stories: 

In a little-noticed memo early last year, Illinois scientists made a dire prediction.

“Bulletin 76,” a communication from University of Illinois researchers, warned that intense rain made worse by climate change was going to get a lot more severe in the next 25 years.

“What is considered safe and adequate today may not hold true in the future,” they wrote of the threat to homes, buildings and people.

I chose this lead because it was different from all the other flood stories that I’ve read over the years. Also, it added a little bit of intrigue and quirkiness. Even the name of the “bulletin” was a mystery. Most importantly, it warned of the dangers of doing nothing. 

Time for travel

I carved out my days to travel from north to south to west. I drove more than 100 miles in my first full day of reporting. Chicago is a long and broad city that requires a great deal of time in the car to branch out to so many communities. 

I needed to find residents who would talk to me, which always requires building trust. So, over the course of a couple of months, I made weekly visits to a West Side church where community members gathered to talk about important matters to them. About 10 miles from my home, I traveled to attend a community meeting each Thursday morning to hear residents talk about the many things that worried them. Repairs after flooding more than 2 years prior were among the most important topics to those in attendance. 

Time and patience

These types of stories require time and patience. I’ve been asked by students during college class lectures how I get people to talk to me. I tell the students that I simply take the time to listen and learn. 

What I produced, so far, is a series of five stories that try to address as many questions as people can ask. The latest story puts specific numbers on the flood problem. What communities are touched the most? How old are the sewers in these areas? What’s being done to address all of this?

I’m going to keep going forward with more reporting and writing. I owe it to the people I’ve covered over the last few months.

It’s another piece of advice I can give fellow journalists. Use the momentum to do more and, hopxefully, effect change.