Bolingbrook Airport Runway 'Destroyed' Residents' Quality of Life: Lawsuit

BOLINGBROOK, IL — A multimillion dollar runway built last year at Bolingbrook’s Clow International Airport has destroyed residents’ quality of life and left them in a state of fear that planes might crash into their homes, according to a lawsuit filed in Will County court.

Thirty four residents and a Naperville man who owns a house on Lily Cache Lane filed the lawsuit against the Village of Bolingbrook.

According to the lawsuit, low-flying planes and helicopters have made the residents “suffer from a constant uneasy feeling — based upon the combination of the volume, sound and close proximity of the aircraft utilizing the runway — that is, or attune to, a stress disorder.”

The residents’ “ability to enjoy the totally normal use of their homes, inside and out, has been and will be destroyed,” the suit said, and they are “frightened … that the planes using the runway are going to hit their house and/or crash in their neighborhood.”

Not only that, the residents have suffered sleep deprivation and their offspring have been deprived of normal childhoods.

The residents — except for the Naperville man — all live on Blackfoot Drive, Lily Cache Lane or Pheasant Chase Drive — the same street where Drew Peterson resided with his third wife, Kathleen Savio, before he moved out and then drowned her in a bathtub in March 2004.

In October 2007, Peterson said his fourth wife, Stacy Peterson, called to let him know she left their car at Clow Airport on her way to start a new life with another man. Stacy Peterson was never seen again.

The residents claim the village indicated it would “justly compensate them for their air rights” but instead “only offered ‘lowball’ sums of money,” according to the lawsuit.