CHICAGO — Some residents across Chicago’s south suburbs spent the day cleaning up after heavy rains led to flooding on Sunday.

More than 24 hours after the heavy rains fell and flooded parts of the south suburbs, standing water in the street remains. Now residents are facing damage to garage doors and a lot of debris is left behind on sidewalks and roads.

Calumet City was a suburb that was hit hard on Sunday. Around 8 to 10 inches of rain fell, leaving behind damage that will take some residents weeks, if not months, to clean up.

“Rain was everywhere man. I don’t know how it was coming, I just knew it was coming down, and it was a lot,” homeowner Craig Williams said.

The Calumet City resident says he was just getting home when the intense rain began to fall, overwhelming sewers and sending feet of water into the streets, damaging garages and flooding basements.

“The sump pump went out. It was working fine and then all I know, I was upstairs for a minute, came back downstairs and the whole basement was flooded,” Williams said.

Williams said he had two pumps working to get the water out on Monday.

FEMA just opened up a disaster recovery center last week at the Calumet City Library, but workers at the center are helping residents with claims from flooding that happened in late June and early July after a federal disaster declaration was made.

Those who oversee the city engineering say the system wasn’t built for so much water at once.

“This region’s always had problems with flooding,” Ken Chastain from the Farnsworth Group, a national engineering and architecture firm, said. “A lot of these sewers are 50, 60, 70 years old and they’re collapsing.

According to Chastain, while the new mayor is working to get millions in federal funds to re-engineer the aging systems, it will be years before major changes will come. For now, he says it will be smaller, more economical fixes.

“These problems have taken decades to build up and really decades of a lot of leaders having neglect on the infrastructure,” Chastain said. “There’s no really way to deal with nine inches in a very short period of time but we can process it better and we can be able to fix things so it moves better.

For residents, it is a long-term goal that feels far away as they deal with the recovery from Sunday’s flooding.

“Hopefully somebody can do something for us. Because I lost all of my clothes in the totes. We lost clothes, the flooring is coming up, everything,” Williams said.

As of Monday, the governor’s office was waiting on south suburban mayors to make a request for state assistance. Once the request comes in, the governor can make the disaster declaration, opening up state resources and the potential opportunity for federal aid as well.