No electricity, no gas

(Our personal flood story, complete with pictures, starts at Albany Park floods-- Record-breaking rains. )

It was deathly quiet that first night, the Sunday night after the flood. The electricity to the neighborhood had been turned off, and People's Gas was digging down the street. We later heard that they had pulled up a piece of gas pipe on every block in the neighborhood to cut off the gas and to minimize the possibility of explosions or fire.

We went to my dear friend Chris' house. She made Paul a burger and I had Thai soup. Paul promptly fell asleep on her couch and slept for a couple of hours.

Our neighborhood was blocked off by police cars, so we had to take the side streets and the alleys to get through. The whole neighborhood, all the way east to Kimball, was without electricity and was eerily dark, eerily silent...

Except for those who had generators. The generators hummed all night.

At least it had stopped raining.

We had a Radio Shack wind up emergency radio and we listened to the news reports on WBBM 780 all night long.

The night was difficult, but eventually Monday morning dawned, bright, sunny, and dry.

We looked down the stairs, but we really couldn't tell if the water had started to go down or not. It still looked as though it were on the fifth step. At least it hadn't gone any higher.

Next part of the story: Senator Durbin and the Press Conference on the Bridge