Des Plaines Flood – Gurnee 1 | Images of Lake County

Beautiful day for photos!

The sun was out, first time in weeks. The wind was a little brisk, but that made for interesting patterns.

Patterns of what, you say?

As promised, I got out and took photos of the flood!

The river has crested at just over 11 feet, the third highest that I know of. They say it’s going to stay that high for maybe the next three days. The whole center of town is flooded, including several schools. The flooded areas are blocked off and you have to have a village-issued badge to get in. Fortunately, we are higher than the floodplain, so just a little water in the basement, not much worse than usual.

So what else? We spent the day gawking – it also gave me a chance to work out my polarizer – and I did!

On the Washington St bridge

Historical marker, from January 13

The tree behind the marker is the one in the center of the flood photo. The water looks to be 6 feet up its trunk. We could kind of see a disturbance in the water’s surface and surmised that’s where the marker was; looking at this photo, I think we were right.

I don’t have many comparison photos (I’ll have to get some later this year), so here is a selection of shots from the Washington Bridge area.

Washington St, heading west to the bridge

Washington St, heading west to the river

Lots of open water where it was open grassland a month ago

Washington St bridge, east side

That little sign out there? Says the underpass is closed!

This path goes to the Des Plaines River Trail, at the post you can just see by the trees

The ripples you can see are the river running over the fence next to the trail that runs under the Washington St bridge

We drove all around today, so I’ll have to post multiple days. I’ll try to keep the quantity of photos down (lol) but I may have to post one for each bridge we visited (four in all).

Tomorrow, Grand Avenue!