Hurricane Ida flooded out five to ten thousand people in Northeast Wilmington in Fall 2021.
Northeast Rising is a community-led organization looking into flooding in Northeast Wilmington. Its leaders say that’s sure to happen again if nothing is done to the 11th Street Bridge area in that Wilmington neighborhood.
The National Fish and Wildlife Foundation funded a study looking at how to repair the riverbank, which included community engagement efforts.
Green Building United’s Delaware Program Manager Karen Igou works with Northeast Rising. She said the community has already reached a consensus.
“I think my next steps are going to be to try to determine why the living shoreline at the 11th Street Bridge, which is overwhelmingly what the community has asked for, is still not being put on the table,” Igou said. “It continues to be a concrete wall under a grass berm.”
Igou said a wall is not the best solution for the area, and Northeast Rising does not plan on going away or quieting down.
The living shoreline would cost about $4 million to put in, compared to the city’s current plans for a $21 million project that she says doesn’t work with nature. The concrete wall would be just one part of that project.
Igou said it’s possible the city could lose that funding if it doesn’t follow its plan exactly, meaning it could be tied to the concrete wall. But she said she wants to see if it’s possible to change those plans to include a living shoreline instead.
“It is an environmental justice issue, and it's also cheaper to fix or to remediate the Brandywine right there by raising the river bank, applying a living shoreline, and creating this basically like a three acre meadow, which would hold water,” Igou said. “That's just earth moving.”
Northeast Rising held a community meeting last week where it distributed 75 disaster preparedness kits to attendees.
Wilmington’s Department of Public Works is still working on putting together a flood study, which was delayed for months but is now expected to be published by the end of January.
Once that’s released, the Department will start looking for funding to address Wilmington’s flood resiliency plans.
