As the rain came down in sheets one summer afternoon late last month, Thomas Baranowski was sitting on the back porch of his Garfield Ridge home when his wife, Rose, stepped outside.

“‘Oh come on, you’ve got to see this,’” she told him.

He followed her down the steep stairwell to their basement, where water was spewing out of their flood drain “just like a geyser,” Baranowski, 79, recalled. Though he and Rose, 80, are lifelong Chicagoans and no strangers to urban flooding, they didn’t see the deluge coming — or the thousands of dollars in water damage that followed. But what if they had been given a heads-up the rain would hit their block so hard?

A new initiative recently launched in Chicago is striving to do just that.

Verizon, in conjunction with Chicago’s Center for Neighborhood Te

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