Traffic in the region Monday reacted much like the rain: overwhelmed with nowhere to go.
Throughout the day, the Indiana Department of Transportation extended its closures and detours on the Borman Expressway, rerouting traffic as far west as Calumet Avenue in Hammond to as far east as Ind. 51 in Lake Station.
With the interstate closed, travelers were delayed for hours through rerouted side streets. Redirected expressway commuters stalled traffic in both directions on U.S. 30 in Indiana and Illinois and on Ill. 394 in Illinois.
INDOT officials said flooding on various parts of Interstate 80/94 and its exits was caused by heavy rains and high levels of the Little Calumet River, which overtopped river levees around Hammond and Munster.
Before the levees were breached, "everything was working fine," INDOT spokeswoman Angie Fegaras said.
Fegaras said it was "hard to speculate" whether or how any equipment failed as a result of the flooding.
"It's hard to say what's not working right now," she said Monday afternoon.
Water overtopped old levees not yet rebuilt as part of a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers project that involved building a 22-mile levee system from Martin Luther King Drive in Gary to the Illinois state line.
The Borman drains into the Little Calumet, and into culverts under levees that are river outlets, said Imad Samara, project manager for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
Water overtopped levees under construction between Kennedy and Northcote avenues and old levees from Northcote west to the state line.
Meanwhile, it was unclear exactly which improvements outlined in a recent report that INDOT has made on the Borman. The report released in April details problems that led to massive flooding on the road last year.
In the report, engineers hired by INDOT cite equipment failure and a lack of multiple agency coordination as contributing to flooding that shuttered the Borman in August 2007.
The report recommended $7 million of improvements, including replacing a malfunctioning flap gate at the Kennedy Avenue interchange. Flooding in the southeast quadrant of the Kennedy Avenue interchange mainly was the result of the 54-inch flap gate being stuck open from debris, the report says.
Fegaras said INDOT has completed several of the recommendations, including replacing dirt berms at some intersections.
"We've done a lot," she said.
But Fegaras said she did not know if the flap gate at Kennedy had been replaced since last year's deluge.
INDOT pumped water away from the Borman on Monday to various fields and ditches near the road. In Hammond, water was pumped south and east of the road to the grassy field where the River Park Apartments once stood.
At Interstate 65, INDOT pumped Borman water back into the Little Calumet.
Fegaras said the agency still was awaiting a final report from the Little Calumet River Basin Development Commission on the number of levee breaches that had occurred since the weekend storm.
INDOT officials said they did not have an estimate on when portions of the Borman would be reopened.
