Noah’s Ark in Chicago
A recent client, owner of a garden apartment, woke up and began to get out of bed in her master bedroom. As she swung her feet over the edge of the bed, she was mortified as her toes found a foot or more of cold, dirty rain water filed with toilet paper and crap, instead of her soft, fluffy carpeting. She called Tomacor in an attempt to decipher how so much water had gotten into her apartment. We helped her understand that the absence of a flood control system for her “new condo” left her vulnerable to all that crap! Now she has to fix it, or sue the condominium board to fix it, because the board is convinced that it’s her problem. This garden apartment horror story is far from rare as most garden apartments are in 50 year old + buildings in the City. The exterior walls are brick or concrete and they are cracked or open to the water in the soil below the exterior dirt. 50 years ago, there weren’t any drain tiles and the basement was just a basement, a place to hang your laundry. 50 years ago basements got wet and it was not a big deal, it was just the basement! Today, developers have magically changed the basements into “garden level condominiums” yet they have never “waterproofed” the exterior foundation walls, installed necessary drain tiles, or isolated the main sewer line from backing up into the “garden level condominium”. If you own a garden level condominium you know what I’m talking about.
Its time for Chicagoans to move to higher ground as the swampy land that this town was built on begins to flood again into basements and garden apartments throughout the City. What’s most disturbing is that water is not the only thing infiltrating the garden apartments as they flood. Our sewers are “combined sewers” so, as the rain water begins to back up into garden apartments, there is a lot more in that water than rain (fecal matter, E. coli, whatever else is in the sewer).
There was a man named Noah in the old time biblical texts who built an Ark in anticipation of a flood. His ability to see into the future was significant. In fact, we need more people like him in Chicago today because the flood waters are rising in garden apartments. We believe that this is such an important problem that we are demanding, as apart of a City ordinance, that developers build Arks for every garden level apartment owner in the city so that they, like Noah and the animals, can march two-by-two into their Arks as the water rises in their apartment.
If you have garden apartment horror stories we would like to hear from you! Email your stories to inspection@tomacor.com!