Hinsdale Has Little Hope With $31K Flood Study

HINSDALE, IL — The Hinsdale village government is joining forces with the Illinois Tollway to spend $31,000 in taxpayer money on a flood study, but officials doubt it will yield anything other than expensive solutions.

At this week's meeting, the Village Board voted to pay half the costs of the engineering study. It is targeting northeast Hinsdale, which includes the tollway.

"The situation here is if you drive east from Garfield along The Lane or Hickory or Walnut, as you pass Elm Street, you go downhill, of course," Trustee Neale Byrne said at the meeting. "Well, when it rains, the water follows the same direction and flows downhill into northeast Hinsdale. If it rains too hard and sewers can't take it away fast enough, the water ends up in the streets."

He said he expected the study to propose expensive solutions such as basins that will cost millions.

"So we're spending $16,000 to maybe learn something. If we spent $50,000 or more, we probably wouldn't be doing this. But this is a relatively small amount of money," Byrne said.

Village President Tom Cauley agreed, saying the study had a 10 or 15 percent chance to present an affordable solution. It would also show northeast Hinsdale residents that the options are expensive.

The flooding in that neighborhood is a longstanding problem because of the topography of the streets, Cauley said.

"One of the things the village has tried to do is when there's a drainage problem, we have tried to work to force water in the streets rather than in residents' yards and basements," he said. "To the extent that there is water in the streets, that's what we have been trying to do — to keep water away from houses."

Trustee Laurel Haarlow said the tollway's involvement was a plus.

"By having the tollway help finance the study, maybe they'll come up with something with their drainage," she said.