This summer, severe storms and extreme heat have crippled infrastructure across major cities.
I was on a call with a friend in Chicago when she mentioned her basement had flooded.
“You might hear some banging,” she said as repair crews worked through the damage.
When I asked about flood insurance, she said she had none.
Floods are historically labeled an “act of God,” requiring special insurance coverage. But Chicago isn’t a bayou or a vulnerable coastal town. It is a lakefront architectural ambition with phenomenal infrastructure. Blaming God feels like a stretch.
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.
Flooding is the most frequent and costly natural disaster in the U.S., according to the Federal Emergency Management Agency. It has affected 99% of U.S. counties over the last three decades. Yet only about 4% of U.S. homeowners carry flood insurance, according to FEMA. Standard homeowners’ policies explicitly exclude it, no matter the cause.
While at least one climate risk model classifies Chicago as having a “minor overall risk” of flooding, the human toll on the ground tells a vastly different story.
About 484,800 adults across the city experienced residential flooding in 2024 alone, according to the Chicago Health Atlas, 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’s heaviest burden, according to the data, exposing severe localized vulnerabilities.
Failure of human policy
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?
If the state knows where the water will go, and the city knows its infrastructure is incapable of containing it, blaming God is inaccurate — though it remains a convenient defense against an otherwise intractable problem.
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.
We often have the data to see these disasters coming, yet we continue to treat predictable infrastructure failures as unavoidable acts of God.
Chicago has no hurricane season, and its flooding doesn’t stem from its riverbanks bursting. Yet it faces one of the most persistent urban drainage crises in the country — one that remains largely invisible because it happens underground, in basements, in neighborhoods that rarely make the national news.
The city’s 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.
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.
Disastrous flooding in 2023
In 2023, an estimated 70,000 Chicago-area homes flooded, the Sun-Times reported. Residents in 71 of the city’s 77 neighborhoods filed flooding complaints in a single storm event in January, according to the Sun-Times.
The Illinois Department of Natural Resources reports a little more than 42% 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.
The communities absorbing the worst of it are on the South and West sides — older, disinvested neighborhoods of color with legacy infrastructure and fewer resources for retrofitting, yet they accounted for 72% of the city’s flood damage claims in 2020, the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago reported. The communities also remain entirely excluded from FEMA risk maps.
In 2023, the Sun-Times reported a resident had $70,000 in damage after 5 feet of sewage shot through a floor drain. Insurance covered nothing in a county where fewer than 1% of homeowners carry flood coverage.
Flood insurance is unattainable for many, and expecting homeowners to shoulder tens of thousands of dollars in damage and retrofitting costs is not realistic.
Floods become disasters only when humans are left in the path of predictable harm. At some point, we have to stop calling it an act of God and call it what it is: a failure of infrastructure and policy not keeping pace with a changing climate.
Catherine Nakalembe is a professor of translational geoAI, bridging geoscience with artificial intelligence to address real-world problems, at the University of Maryland, and a Public Voices Fellow of The OpEd Project.