- Northeast residents were pummeled by Hurricane Ida’s remnants in 2021, and the memories of flooding, displacement and panic remain fresh on the minds of many.
- Resident organizers are launching “Northeast Rising,” a team and climate resilience hub aimed at community engagement and climate-change-fueled disaster preparedness.
- It aims to offer training, resources and safe shelter in the wake disaster — or during extreme summer heat.
Mud was caked up to their knees.
A mom, a dad, their little boy, an image of them walking up the street stays soaked in her mind. It joins displaced families packing local hotels, babies with diaper rashes, damp clothes and hungry faces. Months of new images, more people in need.
Stacey Henry remembers coming home exhausted each night after Hurricane Ida, after its remnants brought extreme flooding to her neighborhood in September 2021. She organized relief efforts; she disseminated supplies, she helped families find housing; she was recognized as a woman of the year. But the self-appointed people’s advocate also remembers more private moments, venting through a clutched phone.
“At night, I would literally go home and there was one friend of mine, she would just listen to me,” the Wilmington native remembered. “I just kept saying, I didn’t know the name of it, I didn’t know what to call it, but I have to build something.”
She would start keeping a list of those unhoused. She would spend hours cooking, bringing trays of pasta to hotels. She would start fielding calls from all over the city, frantically organizing food distribution, asking state officials if they’d buy diapers or dry socks. Days following the flooding were chaotic, and residents in the Northeast were terrified.
“I have to organize something,” Henry continued, recalling her evening musings. “So that when there’s a disaster there’s a place or a group that can come in immediately, until the plans that they have in the file cabinets with dust on them are pulled out.”
Memories of flooding, displacement and panic are still fresh on the minds of many residents in Wilmington’s Northeast. Organizers who stepped up after this storm never want to see the same devastation again. Or, face it unprepared.
Today they hope to have the beginnings of an answer: Northeast Rising.
Henry and other residents banded to launch a climate resilience hub, focused on community engagement and climate-change-fueled disaster readiness. The team has found a funding partner in Philadelphia-based Green Building United, alongside other partners across Delaware.
Packed into Wilmington’s PAL Center, a community center and the base for the new outfit, organizers marked an official launch Saturday, April 29, with information sessions, workshops and free emergency preparedness kits. It’s a first for the neighborhood, Henry said, and a first for Delaware.
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Intensifying future storms, accelerating sea-level rise, extreme heat — she knows the brunt of disasters are borne by under-resourced, vulnerable neighborhoods like her own. Riverside, 11th Street Bridge and Eastside neighborhoods were some of the most affected by Ida.
Now, a vision of preparedness is taking shape. And step one might be getting people’s attention.
Have a story to tell? The News Journal/Delaware Online is placing special emphasis on reporting about heat impact this summer, as part of an ongoing Perilous Course project across USA TODAY Network Northeast examining the human-centered damage and risks driven by the climate crisis. Reach out: kepowers@gannett.com.
Understanding a vision for resiliency in Wilmington
Residents peered into their buckets.
Flashlights, first aid kits, bottled water, blankets, rope, more packed against smooth blue plastic. Many residents who had to replace personal documents just two years ago looked down at plastic sleeves made to store copies of birth certificates and other identification. Over 30 attendees filed into the center, perched on North Market Street’s higher ground, and were handed these stuffed kits.
“Grab the bucket while they’re grabbing you,” Henry put it simply. Her team believes many neighbors would be much better off if they had supplies like these during Ida.
The kits are an early step for Northeast Rising. It meets aims for training on first aid, evacuation routes and more for members and interested residents. Unlike working alone in a makeshift hotel office in 2021, Henry and her team want residents to know there’s a place to go in the wake of disaster.
The hub boasts communication, resources, dry clothes and cool air. And it would support more than post-disaster recovery.
Even on the soggy April morning, Henry knows summer is fast approaching. Core to the hub’s plan, she described, will also be offering a place to escape a different threat.
Still flooding their neighborhood, still sweeping between homes and across pavement, already claiming more lives than any other weather-related cause in the U.S. — it’s heat.
“It’s a place for them to be for the hours that the heat index is dangerously high,” Henry said. Heat index, or how hot a day “feels,” combines both temperature and humidity. When it’s more humid, it’s much harder for the body to cool off by sweating.
Northeast Rising plans to open the air-conditioned gym when conditions call for it, providing water and food. Research shows the brunt of increasing heat will not be felt equally. It will fall on households with lower incomes, renters without access to efficient air conditioning, those facing homelessness and others most vulnerable.
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Back in the PAL, hardly able to keep still as she watched residents listen to Saturday’s speakers, Henry knows she has yet to see anything quite like her vision in the First State. She called it a catalyst.
But, Northeast is just one pocket of Delaware’s largest city.
“This is small,” she said.
“It’s large for me, but it may be small for the city. I don’t have money to do what I need to do — but I’ve started to bring awareness to the support that we’re going to need from the community, from the government, from everyone, to make this hub one of many.”
Storms like these…
Hurricane Ida’s remains brought floods to a 20-block radius of the city.
A maximum crest of 23.1 feet — measured near Rockford Park in the morning of Sept. 2 — had the Brandywine set a new record, as previously reported.
Floodwaters lifted cars, swallowed bridges. Emergency responders rescued over 200 people from homes, wading through the streets in boats. Displaced residents struggled for months to find housing, as city and state response came under fire.
A changing climate will play a role in the prevalence of these strong storms. A warming planet draws more water into the atmosphere, contributing to heavier storms, and a rising sea.
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From the Chesapeake to Massachusetts bays, Ida brought surges several feet above typical high tide levels. Rising seas can spell problems for more inland communities, too, as high tides and strengthened storm surges push water higher in nearby rivers during extreme storms, and into floodplains.
Rivers across the region broke records. Higher tides push back on these rivers, preventing flow back into the sea — while fresh water from extreme rainfall starts stacking up.
If it can’t drain into watersheds, it will find new routes. Without regard for neighborhoods.
Dangerous moisture can be more insidious, too.
For every 1-degree Celsius temperatures rise, according to First Street, the air holds about 7% more water vapor. This contributes to more humid days, with a higher likelihood of hazardous heat.
Heat claims more lives than flooding and hurricanes combined.
Dense urban areas feel heat exacerbated, as concentrations of dark materials like asphalt, steel and brick trap heat between buildings and streets. A difference of a few degrees of extreme heat can affect the body’s ability to regulate, and extended exposure compounds stress on organs. Those with respiratory illnesses, diabetes and obesity maintain the highest risk.
Wilmington already sees an average of seven more days a year over 90 degrees than it did 50 years ago.
The state is tied with Arizona as the fourth-fastest warming state based on temperature trends since 1970. Average temperatures in Delaware are projected to increase 2.5 to 4.5 degrees by 2050, from 2012 averages. That could rise up to 8 degrees by 2100, in the worst emissions scenario, according to the Delaware Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control.
Historically just one day above 100 degrees would be rare in Delaware, coming about once a year, if that. But by 2050, the state’s Climate Action Plan warns of two to eight each year, alongside projections of up to five nights with temperatures above 80.
The perilous list continues.
This more extreme future will likely demand physical adaptation, according to a national report on hazardous heat, as well as planning for emergency heat events, such as checking on residents, creating more cooling centers and ensuring people can reach them.
That means communities and governments unfamiliar with extreme heat will have to adapt and prepare for it.
“The conversation needs to be about people,” Henry said, back in Wilmington. “It’s about our climate and what we’re going to do to prepare ourselves for what’s coming.”
Have a story to tell? The News Journal/Delaware Online is placing a special emphasis on reporting about heat impact this summer, as part of an ongoing Perilous Course project across USA TODAY Network Northeast examining the human-centered damage and risks driven by the climate crisis.
Contact this reporter at kepowers@gannett.com or (231) 622-2191, and follow her on Twitter @kpowers01.
