The sump pump, a recent discovery in my home, is a long-standing necessity for Chicago residents. Basements frequently flood, not because of acts of God but because of historically poor drainage and legacy sewage systems.<\/p>\n
Flooding is the most frequent and costly natural disaster<\/a> in the U.S., according to the Federal Emergency Management Agency. It has affected 99% of U.S. counties<\/a> over the last three decades. Yet only about 4%<\/a> of U.S. homeowners carry flood insurance, according to FEMA. Standard homeowners\u2019 policies explicitly exclude it, no matter the cause<\/a>.<\/p>\n While at least one climate risk model classifies Chicago as having a \u201cminor overall risk<\/a>\u201d of flooding, the human toll on the ground tells a vastly different story.<\/p>\n About 484,800 adults across the city experienced residential flooding in 2024 alone, according to the Chicago Health Atlas<\/a>, a website created by the Chicago Department of Public Health and the Population Health Analytics Metrics Evaluation, or PHAME, Center at University of Illinois Chicago, which shares data with the public on health-related issues. With 41,200 affected residents, the West Side community of Austin bears the city\u2019s heaviest burden, according to the data, exposing severe localized vulnerabilities.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Destroyed belongings sit in the flooded basement of a home in the Austin neighborhood in 2023. <\/p>\n Failure of human policy<\/p>\n But we must ask: At what point does a hazard this predictable and frequent stop being an act of God and instead become a clear failure of human policy?<\/p>\n If the state knows where the water will go, and the city knows its infrastructure<\/a> is incapable of containing it, blaming God is inaccurate \u2014 though it remains a convenient defense against an otherwise intractable problem.<\/p>\n As a professor of translational geoAI at the University of Maryland, I use satellite data and artificial intelligence to tackle real-world vulnerabilities, creating policy-ready intelligence for disaster risk management to identify failure points, opportunities for improvement and practical applications. What Chicago is experiencing is not an isolated meteorological event. It is a clear failure of policy to keep pace with a changing climate.<\/p>\n We often have the data to see these disasters coming, yet we continue to treat predictable infrastructure failures as unavoidable acts of God.<\/p>\n Chicago has no hurricane season, and its flooding doesn\u2019t stem from its riverbanks bursting. Yet it faces one of the most persistent<\/a> urban drainage crises in the country \u2014 one that remains largely invisible because it happens underground, in basements, in neighborhoods that rarely make the national news.<\/p>\n The city\u2019s combined sewer system, which handles both stormwater and sanitary sewage in a single network, dates to the late 19th century. It was built for a different climate, with steadier rains that fell gradually enough for the system to absorb.<\/p>\n What Chicago gets now are storms that drop 2 or more inches in a single hour. When the system fills, water reverses, coming up through basement floor drains as a mix of stormwater and raw sewage, into furnaces, water heaters, electrical panels and everything a family has stored below grade.<\/p>\n Disastrous flooding in 2023<\/p>\n In 2023, an estimated 70,000<\/a> Chicago-area homes flooded, the Sun-Times reported. Residents in 71 of the city\u2019s 77 neighborhoods<\/a> filed flooding complaints in a single storm event in January, according to the Sun-Times.<\/p>\n The Illinois Department of Natural Resources reports a little more than 42%<\/a> of Cook County is now covered in impervious surface: roads, parking lots and driveways that shed water rather than absorb it, concentrating every rainstorm into a surge the sewers cannot swallow.<\/p>\n The communities absorbing the worst of it are on the South and West sides \u2014 older, disinvested neighborhoods of color with legacy infrastructure and fewer resources for retrofitting, yet they accounted for 72%<\/a> of the city\u2019s flood damage claims in 2020, the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago reported. The communities also remain entirely excluded from FEMA risk maps.<\/p>\n![\"Inches](\"https:\/\/cst.brightspotcdn.com\/dims4\/default\/c18be2b\/2147483647\/strip\/true\/crop\/1052x754+0+0\/resize\/840x602!\/quality\/90\/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fchorus-production-cst-web.s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com%2Fbrightspot%2Fb8%2F2f%2Fee955b3547809c38a29125be7da5%2Fscreenshot-2026-07-24-at-9-21-59-am.png\")
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