Wilmette: Cleaning Up After the Storm

Nice picture, huh? I snapped that one over by Locust Road on one of my "drive arounds," looking for how others had fared after last Thursday's terrible storm in Wilmette. The "haves"--those who never lost electricity--by and large did not flood, thanks to functioning sump pumps. Unfortunately, the house pictured above took a lot of water, and I imagine that by today all that stuff is sitting out by the street.

There must be thousands of yards of carefully rolled up carpeting by curbs throughout Wilmette, along with furniture, boxes, junk, and all sorts of other things stored in basements and lower levels. It looks pretty terrible. The promised Wednesday pick-up of all that junk is now happening Saturday--I guess there must have been too much to get in all one day.

Today, my neighbor was having her walls knocked out, and I think there are a number of people doing that. At our house, we are running a new dehumidifier. If you are looking for one, Ace Hardware on Waukegan has an excellent selection. When I went over there I saw a brand new flooring store; I wonder if they decided to open just to try to sell carpet—there is going to be a lot of demand for that. We haven't finished getting all the ruined carpet out of the house yet due to limited time, heavy furniture, and "techno cottage" items, all of which have to be moved first. Wilmette resident and editorial page editor of the Chicago Sun-Times wrote a good article on how his family and neighbors were affected by the storm, including his experience with wet carpet; you might like to read it..

I haven't heard my sump pump since the electricity went on Monday night; so it's possible we had an additional storm casualty. There is an awful lot of work here left to do at our house, even though we didn't take too much water. We are grateful that this is Labor Day weekend because there is a lot of labor needed, and we can use the extra day.

Today, I saw a smashed car that obviously had a large tree fall on top of it. It was loaded on one of those trucks that carry cars. There were a number of cars that had trees fall on them after the storm; and generally speaking there is a lot of damage. The best thing about this catastrophe is that no one was killed. I haven’t heard of any major injuries either. There are very few natural disasters that you can say that about, and the people of Wilmette are lucky indeed.

Oh yes, today is Blog Day. I've been to busy to write anything special, so like on TV, we will offer you a rerun.