This story was originally published on Yale e360, and reproduced as part of a collaboration with Climate Desk. Brenda Whitfield remembered the first major flooding at her home, in the Eastwick area of Southwest Philadelphia. Hurricane Floyd filled the ground floor of her house with five feet of floodwater. “I was terrified half to death,” she said.
Flooding in Philadelphia’s Eastwick neighborhood in August 2020 following Tropical Storm Isaias. Department of Fire in Philadelphia
As part of the Climate Desk collaboration, this article, which was first published by Yale e360, is reproduced around.
Brenda Whitfield recalled Hurricane Floyd filling her ground floor with five feet of water during the second significant flood at her home in the Eastwick neighborhood of Southwest Philadelphia. She remarked about the 1999 storm,” I was afraid half to death.” ” The water was coming, and the next thing I knew, my husband was telling me,” Brianna, you have to leave.” While her husband stayed at home, she hurried with her kids to a relative’s home in an upper part of Eastwick. She said,” We saw canoes coming to get pets and seniors here.”
Since Floyd, there have been four exotic storms: Ivan, Charlie, Irene, Sandy, Tropical Storm Isaias, and Hurricane Ida, which each flooded Eastwick with up to five and a half feet of muddy water. Then there were the smaller storms, which left Whitfield and her neighbors with water in their basements and unanswered questions about whether the neighborhood would survive as climate change brought on more flooding.
Whitfield, 75, has resided in her three-story townhouse on Saturn Place in the” Planet Streets” section of Eastwick for 43 years.” Every time it rains, and every time they say it’s severe weather ,” she says. The area, which is on a quarter-mile from Cobbs and Darby Creeks’ confluence, has seen 20 floods in that time.
She and her neighbors are currently thinking about forecasts that flooding will get worse as sea levels rise from the local Delaware River and higher storm surges are produced by a tidal section of the opposite Schuylkill River. The majority of the area is 11 feet below the Delaware River’s level.
The majority-Black community is being impacted by larger, more numerous storms that are being brought on by a warming climate at higher points in their watersheds.
Whitfield, the captain of her block and the secretary of Eastwick United, a community organization committed to finding solutions to make Easternwick resilient to flooding, said,” Every time it rains and every time they say it’s extreme weather, we get anxiety, and we can’t sleep.”
Related hydraulic challenges exist in low-lying communities all over the country, including how to safeguard residents and property from rising seas and worsening inland flooding. These areas are frequently low-income communities of color. However, low-lying Eastwick has long-standing economic challenges that make adaptation particularly urgent and challenging due to its high Dark population and history of pollution.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency revised Eastwick’s flood map in 2022, expanding the area that is anticipated to experience flooding in major storms, in response to the neighborhood ‘ severe flooding and the expectation of worse to come. 89 percent of Eastwick properties have a” severe” risk of flooding within the next 30 years, according to the climate-information nonprofit First Street Foundation’s tool Risk Factor.
The Delaware River in Philadelphia will rise 1.34 feet from its 2000 level by 2050, according to NOAA’s prediction from last year, and it will do so by about four feet by the turn of the century. A new study by a team led by Drexel University suggests that rising seas may also cause high-tide flooding in Eastwick — unrelated to any storms — as early as the 2060s. According to the study, great tide flooding that is comparable in severity to current rain-related flooding could occur in the neighborhood by the 2080s.
NOAA chose Eastwick as one of several regional test cases for identifying equal, community-driven ways to protect low-lying communities from escalating climate threats due to the community’s regional vulnerability and status as an EJ community. The organization’s Climate Program gave Eastwick nearly$ 300,000 in fiscal 2021 to fund research into potential flooding solutions under the direction of the Drexel team.
Better stormwater management in the watersheds of the two creeks that historically flood Eastwick, an earthen levee to protect the neighborhood’s most vulnerable areas, and a” land swap” in which residents from 265 homes would be moved to higher ground — a process also known as” managed retreat”— are the three main solutions under consideration by the city and researchers from three universities.
Eastwick was referred to as the Meadows or Clearview in the first 20th century, a semi-rural marshland whose empty spaces attracted weekend visitors from northern Philadelphia. Businesses and families, as well as whites and people of color, started to settle in the area, and by the middle of the 20th century, there were about 19, 000 residents without sidewalks or sanitary sewer systems.
The city started an urban renewal program for the area in 1950 with the goal of re-establishing a culturally integrated community with better jobs, infrastructure, and outdoor facilities. The project destroyed 4, 000 homes and relocated more than 8, 000 people through its principal appointed developer, the Korman Company, before stalling out in the 1980s and only 500 fresh homes were constructed. Michael Nairn, a professor of industrial studies at the University of Pennsylvania, claims that part of the reason Korman was unable to accomplish its building objectives was because white people moving from the city to the suburbs reduced the demand for homes in the area. Two landfills were leaking chemicals, including trichloroethane and PCBs, into soil and groundwater at the same time, one of which overlooks residential areas on the north side of Eastwick.
Both landfills were added to the provincial Superfund list in 2001 for cleanup, and remediators started to cap the dumps and plant thousands of trees there after removing contaminated soil from the yards of nearby homes. The remaining undeveloped land — roughly 135 acres that are above the marsh and could be used for the proposed” land swap” if the community supports the plan— was taken over by the Philadelphia Redevelopment Authority in 2015.
The levee and the land swap proposals are being carefully examined by Philadelphia’s Office of Sustainability, which is overseeing national, state, and local work on the flooding issue. The US Army Corps of Engineers proposed a levee that would run 1,400 feet along Cobbs Creek’s east bank and be 15 feet higher. Modeling demonstrated that the levee met more of the Corps’ criteria than other potential measures, such as home elevation, home buyouts, or the construction of practical flood walls, according to Jay Smith, project manager for the Corp’s Eastwick study, who spoke at a virtual community meeting this month. He acknowledged that some” induced flooding” would result from the levee in adjacent areas, but he added that the Corps would take more steps to manage stormwater in those areas.
Earl Wilson, a 41-year-old resident of Eastwick and the president of another community organization known as the Eagle Friends and Neighbors Coalition, expressed concern that the levee might shield occupants from floods coming from one direction but hardly from others.” In this case, you have actually significant environmental justice questions, and really substantial flood risk.” You can’t simply pick up that levee and declare,” We’re going to switch it over here because we believe the flood is moving in that direction ,” he said. Who is to say that the Schuylkill region or the ocean won’t be the source of the flood?
The levee may stop flooding in the most vulnerable areas for a decade or two, claims Franco Montalto, an engineering professor at Drexel who is in charge of scientific research on Eastwick flood protection. However, he claimed that as climate change quickens, it is less likely to be successful.
Montalto also does not favor inland solutions. He claimed that 34 municipalities would need to do a much better job of controlling stormwater that rushes off opaque surfaces, like parking lots and buildings, and into creeks if creek flow were to be reduced higher in the watershed. Could or would those communities carry out that task? The quick answer is no, Montalto declared. ” They would need to take much more action, and it’s unclear what will be done.”
According to Montalto, modeling demonstrates that the” land swap” would be the most economical and secure of all the options on the table. The most resilient residents would be relocated to another neighborhood in Eastwick, allowing them to maintain their communities. Meadows and wetlands would reappear on land that had once been inhabited by people, helping to withstand upcoming rainstorms.
In a community whose residents are disproportionately affected by economic issues, Montalto said,” a land swap would combine flood control with natural restoration.”
You have definitely big climate justice issues in this case, as well as a big flood risk, he said. ” It’s the idea of trying to take an equitable approach to flood resilience, telling people of color who have experienced other environmental injustices [ such as having landfills in their communities ] that there is a way to stay in your community and thereby restore green space.”
But that’s not how some locals perceive it. Even if it’s still within Eastwick, a land swap that would take them to higher ground would also be away from their neighborhood, their neighbors, and everything they are accustomed to.
Whitfield, for one, claimed she doesn’t intend to relocate to a fresh, higher-floor home. She is rather basing her hopes on a levee. It is extremely difficult to uproot yourself and start over once you reach top status, she said.
Since the 1980s, efforts have been made to relocate entire communities or portions of them across the US. For instance, in New Jersey, a state-run program called Blue Acres purchases regularly flooded properties from eager sellers at market prices, demolishes them, and makes room for floods to recede in the future. Since its inception in the 1990s, the program has purchased about 1, 000 of these homes, typically along the Atlantic Coast and Delaware Bay, and has assisted displaced residents in finding new residences in safer neighborhoods. However, detractors claim that these efforts pale in comparison to the difficulties of climate change, which by 2050 is predicted to raise the state’s sea level by approximately two feet.
According to a paper by A. R. Siders, who studies climate change adaptation at the University of Delaware, the Federal Emergency Management Agency purchased about 40, 000 properties between 1989 and 2019 through its managed-retrenchment program.” We know the seas are going to continue to rise.”
Since 1982, Gordon Branham, 71, has resided less than a mile from Planet Streets in Eastwick. Branham, a crippled Vietnam veteran who claims that the ongoing threat of flooding makes his PTSD worse, expressed his love for his community and interest in the potential land swap. However, he is concerned that the action wouldn’t be sufficiently protecting and is thinking about quitting Eastwick immediately. ” We know the seas are going to continue to rise, so I’m not moving to another possible flood-prone area.”
Earl Wilson is also open to talking about a” land swap ,” but like Whitfield, he insisted that all locals in the affected area would need to buy-in. He claimed that even if some residents agree to relocate, they will still be prone to flooding because some of them are willing to do so.
Some people are open to the idea of moving, he claimed. However, many people are rooted in their streets and just want the flood situation to worsen to the point where they feel secure. I want to guarantee that these individuals receive a good shake.
The Biden Administration mandated that 40 % of federal infrastructure funding benefit underserved communities, and the city has now received FEMA funding for flood mitigation in Eastwick. It anticipates receiving additional funding through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and climate initiatives in the Inflation Reduction Act.
The Office of Sustainability emphasized that while the community’s needs will be given priority when making a final decision regarding flood-control measures, an agreement won’t be reached right away. According to the agency, these discussions are very fragile and time-consuming, particularly since we are also attempting to establish trust with locals who have experienced significant harm.
To reduce risk, the city and its national partners are thinking about installing short-term” HESCO” flood barriers, which are wire baskets filled with soil and covered in artificial textiles. They are also giving residents advice on how to flood-proof their homes.
Margaret Cobb, who has spent 40 years living in Eastwick, is not depending on flood-proofing. She drives to a local hotel after backing her car away from her garage, where it would be damaged, when there are strong storms in the forecast. The 80-year-old returns when the water recedes and observes as her home’s renovations are finished.
Cobb said she is now open to the idea of the proposed land swap, particularly if it would allow her to stay in Eastwick, but she anticipates worse to come.
It’s pretty difficult to go through this every year, she said, so I would approve of that. She continued, referring to the storm that was moving through the Atlantic in the middle of September,” Even the Hurricane Lee that is passing, you wonder what direction it will take.” ” For us seniors, the stress increases as we age.” As part of the Climate Desk collaboration, this article, which was first published by Yale e360, is reproduced around. In the Eastwick neighborhood of Southwest Philadelphia, Brenda Whitfield recalled Hurricane Floyd filling her ground floor with five feet of water during the second significant flood. She remarked,” I was scared half to death ,” of the
This story was originally published on Yale e360, and reproduced as part of a collaboration with Climate Desk. Brenda Whitfield remembered the first major flooding at her home, in the Eastwick area of Southwest Philadelphia. Hurricane Floyd filled the ground floor of her house with five feet of floodwater. “I was terrified half to death,” she said.
Flooding after Tropical Storm Isaias in August 2020 in Eastwick neighborhood of Philadelphia.Philadelphia Fire Department. This story was originally published by Yale e360 and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.. Brenda Whitfield recalled the first major flood at her home in the Eastwick section of Southwest Philadelphia, when Hurricane Floyd filled her ground floor with five feet of water. “I was scared half to death,” she said of the 1999 storm. “The water was coming, and the next thing I knew my husband was like, ‘Brenda, you got to leave.’” She rushed with her children to a relative’s house in a higher section of Eastwick while her husband stayed home. “We saw canoes coming to get pets and seniors here,” she said.. Since Floyd, there have been Tropical Storms Ivan and Charlie in 2004; Hurricanes Irene and Sandy in 2011 and 2012, respectively; Tropical Storm Isaias in 2020; and Hurricane Ida in 2021, each of which flooded parts of Eastwick with up to five and a half feet of muddy water. And then there were the smaller storms that left Whitfield and her neighbors with water in their basements and lingering questions about whether the community will remain habitable as climate change brings ever more flooding.. “Every time it rains, and every time they say it’s severe weather, we get anxiety, we can’t sleep.”. Whitfield, 75, has lived in her three-story townhouse on Saturn Place, in the “Planet Streets” section of Eastwick, for 43 years. Located about a quarter-mile from the confluence of Cobbs and Darby Creeks, the neighborhood has experienced 20 floods during those years.. Now, she and her neighbors are contemplating predictions that flooding will worsen as sea-level rise from the nearby Delaware River, and a tidal section of the adjacent Schuylkill River, produce higher storm surges. Most of the neighborhood lies 11 feet below the level of the Delaware River.. Meanwhile, bigger and more frequent storms linked with a warming climate are swelling the volume of the creeks that bear down on the majority-Black community from points higher in their watersheds.. “Every time it rains, and every time they say it’s severe weather, we get anxiety, we can’t sleep,” said Whitfield, who is captain of her block and the secretary of Eastwick United, a community group dedicated to finding ways to make Eastwick resilient to flooding.. Across the United States, low-lying communities face similar hydrological challenges: how to protect people and property from rising seas and increased inland flooding. Many of these places are low-income communities of color. But low-lying Eastwick, with a majority Black population and a history of pollution, has long-standing socioeconomic challenges that make adaptation especially urgent and difficult.. Based on the neighborhood’s chronic flooding and the expectation of worse to come, the Federal Emergency Management Agency in 2022 revised Eastwick’s flood map, enlarging the area that is expected to see flooding in big storms. According to Risk Factor, a tool created by the climate-information nonprofit First Street Foundation, 89 percent of Eastwick properties face a “severe” risk of flooding in the next 30 years.. Last year, NOAA predicted that sea level rise will cause the Delaware River at Philadelphia to rise 1.34 feet by 2050 from its 2000 level, and it will rise by almost four feet by the end of the century. Rising seas may also lead to high-tide flooding in Eastwick—unrelated to any storms—as soon as the 2060s, according to a new study by a team led by Drexel University. By the 2080s, the study said, the neighborhood could experience high-tide flooding that is similar in extent to today’s rain-related flooding.. Eastwick’s geographic vulnerability and its status as an EJ community led NOAA to select the community as one of a number of national test cases for finding equitable, community-driven ways to protect low-lying communities from intensifying climate threats. In fiscal 2021, the agency’s Climate Program provided Eastwick with almost $300,000 for research, led by the Drexel team, into possible solutions to flooding.. The three major solutions under consideration by the city and researchers from three universities are: better control of stormwater upstream in the watersheds of the two creeks that historically flood Eastwick; an earthen levee that would protect the neighborhood’s most vulnerable areas; and a “land swap” in which residents from 265 homes would be moved to higher ground, a process also known as “managed retreat.”. In the early 20th century, Eastwick was known as the Meadows or Clearview, a semi-rural marshland whose open spaces attracted weekend visitors from central Philadelphia. Businesses and families—whites and people of color—began moving in, and by mid-century the neighborhood was home to some 19,000 people living without sanitary sewer systems or sidewalks.. Starting in 1950, the city launched an urban renewal program for the neighborhood that aimed to re-create a racially integrated community with improved infrastructure, jobs, and recreational facilities. Through its primary appointed developer, the Korman Company, the project demolished 4,000 homes and relocated more than 8,000 people before stalling out—with just 500 new homes built—in the 1980s. According to Michael Nairn, a professor of urban studies at the University of Pennsylvania, Korman had failed to meet its building goals in part because white flight from the city to the suburbs reduced demand for homes in the neighborhood. Meanwhile, two landfills, one of which overlooks residential areas on the west side of Eastwick, were leaking chemicals, including trichloroethane and PCBs, into soil and groundwater.. In 2001, both landfills were added to the federal Superfund list for cleanup: Contaminated soil was removed from the yards of nearby homes, and remediators began to cap the dumps and plant them with thousands of trees. In 2015, the Philadelphia Redevelopment Authority took over the remaining undeveloped land—about 135 acres that sit above the marsh and may, if the community supports the plan, be used for the proposed “land swap.”. Philadelphia’s Office of Sustainability, which is coordinating federal, state, and local work on the flooding issue, is looking closely at both the levee and the land swap proposals. Proposed by the US Army Corps of Engineers, a levee would be 15 feet high and run for 1,400 feet along the east bank of Cobbs Creek. Jay Smith, project manager for the Corps’ Eastwick study, told a virtual community meeting this month that modeling showed the levee met more of the Corps’ criteria than other possible measures—such as home elevation, home buyouts, or the building of concrete flood walls. He acknowledged the levee would lead to some “induced flooding” in nearby areas, but said the Corps would take additional measures to control stormwater in those communities.. “In this case, you have really significant environmental justice questions, and really significant flood risk.”. Earl Wilson, a 41-year resident of Eastwick who is president of the Eastwick Friends and Neighbors Coalition, another community group, worried that a levee might protect residents from a flood coming from one direction but not from others. “You can’t just pick up that levee and say, ‘We are going to switch it over here because we think the flood is coming in that direction,’” he said. “Who is to say that the flood is not going to come from the Schuylkill area or from the ocean?”. According to Franco Montalto, a Drexel professor of engineering who is leading the academic research on Eastwick flood protection, the levee might prevent flooding in the most vulnerable areas for a decade or two. But he said it is less likely to succeed as climate change accelerates.. Nor does Montalto favor upstream solutions. Reducing creek flow higher in the watershed, he said, would require 34 municipalities to do a much better job of containing stormwater that rushes off impermeable surfaces, like parking lots and buildings, and into creeks. Could or would those communities do that work? “The short answer is no,” Montalto said. “They would need to do a whole lot more, and it is not clear that is going to happen.”. Of all the options on the table, Montalto said, modeling shows the “land swap” would be the most cost effective and the most protective. It would move the most vulnerable people to another area in Eastwick, allowing them to keep their communities intact. Land that once housed people would revert to meadows and wetlands that would help absorb future downpours and storm surges.. A land swap would combine flood control with natural restoration in a community whose residents are disproportionately affected by environmental problems, Montalto said.. “In this case, you have really significant environmental justice questions, and really significant flood risk,” he said. “It’s the idea of trying to take an equitable approach to flood resilience, telling people of color who have been subjected to other types of environmental injustices [such as siting landfills within their communities] that there is a way that you could stay in your community, and in so doing restore green space.”. But many residents don’t see it that way. A land swap that would move them to higher ground, even if it’s still within Eastwick, is still a move from their block, their neighbors, and all that is familiar.. Whitfield, for one, said she has no plans to move to a new house on higher ground. Instead, she’s pinning her hopes on a levee. “Once you become a senior, it is very hard to uproot yourself and start over again,” she said.. The relocation of whole communities, or sections of them, has been pursued throughout the US since the 1980s. In New Jersey, for example, a state-run program called Blue Acres buys chronically flooded properties from willing sellers at market prices, then demolishes them and creates open space to absorb future floods. The program has bought about 1,000 such homes since its inception in the 1990s, mostly along the Atlantic Coast and Delaware Bay, and has helped displaced residents find new homes in safer areas. But critics say these efforts are dwarfed by the challenges of climate change, which is expected to raise the state’s sea level about two feet by 2050.. “I’m not going to move to another potential flood-prone area because we know the seas are going to continue to rise.”. Nationally, the Federal Emergency Management Agency bought some 40,000 properties between 1989 and 2019 through its managed-retreat program, according to a paper by A.R. Siders, who researches climate-change adaptation at the University of Delaware.. Gordon Branham, 71, has lived less than a mile from Eastwick’s Planet Streets since 1982. A disabled Vietnam veteran who said his PTSD is worsened by the constant threat of flooding, Branham said he loves his neighborhood and is open to the proposed land swap. But he worries that the move wouldn’t be protective enough and is considering leaving Eastwick altogether. “I’m not going to move to another potential flood-prone area because we know the seas are going to continue to rise.”. Earl Wilson is also open to discussing the idea of a “land swap,” but like Whitfield he argued that it would need buy-in from all residents in the affected area. If some residents are unwilling to move, he said, they’ll remain vulnerable to flooding even if others agree to relocate.. “Some are open to the idea [of moving],” he said. “But a lot of people are set in their street and would only want to see the flood situation developed to the point where they could feel safe where they are. I want to make sure that these people are given their fair shake.”. The city has already received FEMA funding for flood mitigation in Eastwick through the Biden Administration’s requirement that 40 percent of federal infrastructure funding benefit underserved communities, and it expects to receive more funding through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and climate initiatives in the Inflation Reduction Act.. The Office of Sustainability stressed that the final decision on flood-control measures will prioritize what the community wants, but it predicted that agreement won’t be quick. “These conversations are very delicate and take time, especially because we are also working on building trust with residents that have gone through substantial harm,” the agency said.. In the meantime, the city and its federal partners are considering installing temporary “HESCO” flood barriers—wire baskets covered with synthetic textiles and filled with soil—to mitigate risk, and it is advising residents on how to flood-proof their homes.. Margaret Cobb, who has lived in Eastwick for 40 years, isn’t counting on flood-proofing. When a big storm is forecast, she backs her car from her garage, where it would be ruined, and drives to a nearby hotel. The 80-year-old returns when the water recedes and watches while the repairs to her home are completed.. But with the expectation of worse to come, Cobb said she’s now open to the idea of the proposed land swap, especially if it allowed her to stay in Eastwick.. “I would approve of that because it’s very stressful going through this every year,” she said. “Even the Hurricane Lee that’s passing, you wonder what direction it’s going to take,” she added, referring to the storm that was moving northward through the Atlantic in mid-September. “The older we get, the more stress it is for us seniors.”
