Around 2 a.m. on Thursday, a Forest Park resident living near the Howard Mohr Community Center at Des Plaines and Jackson called the police department about a flood of water spilling out of the building.
The Forest Park Police Department alerted the village’s public works department, said its director, Sal Stella, who was woken up in the early hours of the morning. He got to addressing the streams flowing from the million-gallon reservoir – the underground vessel that holds Forest Park’s drinking water.
Stella says the flood was caused by a computer failure at the public works department, which resulted in a valve turning to let in too much water.
“When the computer failed,” Stella said, “the valve that the computer maintains, which is the valve that brings in the water from Chicago, went all the way open and was allowing all this water to come into our reservoir that was already full.”
“Because the computer failed, we didn’t get any alarms sent to us,” Stella added.
The overflowing water flooded both the community center and the pump station, which sends water from the reservoir around the village.
To start cleanup efforts, Stella said the village first claimed the flood on its insurance. Then, public works staff cleaned out the pump station and helped community center staff do the same.
While the tiled part of the community center is salvageable, the portions that are carpeted – like staff offices and the area where the center holds day camps for children – will have to be torn up, fanned out and re-floored. In the meantime, Stella says day camps will be hosted on the tiled portion of the building.
The reservoir underneath the community center has increasingly been at the forefront of village council conversations, since a structural analysis at the end of 2023 revealed that the reservoir’s ceiling was deteriorating. While emergency buttresses and monitoring devices were installed in the reservoir, the village council has discussed whether to repair the reservoir or build new ones.
This year, commissioners seem to lean toward constructing new reservoirs and have discussed with Burke Engineering about doing so on one of two village-owned plots: the Blue Line station parking lot or the Altenheim.
Though no decisions have been made about whether to build new reservoirs, Stella said he was unsure whether Thursday’s flooding affected the deteriorating reservoir.
“If there was anything that added to the integrity of the ceiling that was collapsing, we won’t know until we drain the tower in the coming weeks,” Stella said.