2011-07-23-Weather-Deluge

Part of the “Ring of Fire” that engulfed much of the country, storms arrived here and packed a one-two punch.  After many weeks of high heat, humidity and drought like conditions with only trace amounts of rainfall we received a barrage of precipitation that rivaled hurricane conditions. The last bit of rainfall we had was the “Derecho” on July 11 with 0.49″ and before that on June 22 with 0.42″ as measured by the rain gauge on Algonguin Road at Salt Creek.  This “Deluge” storm system dropped approximately 0.4″ at 1 am Friday morning and then 0.9″ at 9 am.  However, the heart of the storm dropped 4.7″ from midnight Friday night to 3 am Saturday morning.   The chart to the right demonstrates how the rain fell.  Afterwards it was determined that July 23 from midnight to midnight was “Chicago’s wettest calendar day in modern weather history” which totalled 6.86″ of precipitation.  Many areas within the Township limits experienced some sort of flooding.  One in particular was the Plum Grove Estates Subdivision in the southeast corner of the Township, located at Algonquin and Route 53.  Based on the rainfall gauges and tables it seems that this “Deluge” was a 50 year storm event which has a probablity of occurrence of 2% for any given year.