After disaster, Wilmington advocates become the help they needed

Stacey Henry’s headlamp light darted and bounced off the walls of a senior center dining room.

The gothic archways of the Village of St. John senior housing complex watched over Henry as she demonstrated the use of a headlamp to 10 attentive tenants on a recent evening. 

The light flickered over oxygen tanks and metal walkers huddled at the edges of dining room tables. Neat rows of milk cartons sat near pizza boxes as a handful of seniors ate their meals gathered around a table. 

It was dinnertime and Henry was there to teach. 

Henry, founder of Delaware’s 1st Resilience Hub, stood in front of a plastic table sprinkled with a poncho, rope, gloves, a survival candle and a crank radio. The emergency preparedness organization was created in the wake of Hurricane Ida and largely in the absence of government agencies.

The group was founded in 2022 and meets monthly around a table at Panera Bread off U.S. Route 202 in Wilmington. 

The hub’s members are all trained as a community emergency response team (CERT) under the Federal Emergency Management Agency. The training prepares groups to work alongside emergency responders during emergencies to help community members and families. 

“We’re not trying to be superheroes,” Henry said. “We’re trying to be a positive resource in the community, that’s all.”

Henry is preparing to become a FEMA CERT trainer herself to teach other groups about how to help in times of crises. The senior center visit was part of the hub’s newest effort to reach and teach some of the most vulnerable community members on how to be prepared for an emergency.

Sometimes, it’s a dining room full of seniors, other times it’s only a few residents around a modest table. 

Nevertheless, the lesson remains the same.

“Our older population is the most vulnerable,” Henry said. “We want to be able to empower them to be prepared.”

A hub formed in floodwaters 

In 2021, Hurricane Ida incited the largest flood in 200 years along the Brandywine Creek and caused over $100 million in public infrastructure damage in the region. Residents had to climb out of windows with their children to escape their apartments and the rising floodwaters. 

The flooding displaced over 200 Wilmington residents who were largely left on their own to find housing or temporary hotel accommodations. Residents received little to no help from city or state agencies after the waters receded.

Displaced families slept in their cars and hopped between a patchwork of hotels, motels and stretches with family for months after the floods. 

“Little or no support, resources or services — that’s the reason that the Resilience Hub was formed,” Henry said. “The emergency plan that we as civilians or citizens expected was not there.”

Residents instead relied on the efforts of Henry, a private citizen at the time, who helped provide food, supplies and, eventually, housing. Henry held regular meetings with residents in libraries to help them fill out housing forms and replace vital documents they had lost in the floods. 

Henry helped people navigate Delaware’s complex and strained affordable housing system that typically brandishes a yearslong waitlist. Three years after the floods, Henry has situated 119 displaced residents into affordable housing across the state, ranging from Claymont to Harrington. 

“I’m going to have my nose wherever it needs to be to make sure that I’m providing good resources for our community,” Henry said. 

‘I’m a helper’

Zakiya Minkah stood in the belly of a senior housing center on a recent morning. An unopened box of doughnuts sat idly by as Minkah, a retired educator and member of the Resilience Hub, waited for residents to arrive. 

Henry stood next to her as they both donned the hub’s signature bright pink shirts. 

The pair faced an empty, dimly lit meeting room in the basement of Sacred Heart Village II, an affordable senior housing complex in Wilmington’s Eastside. It was a Monday morning and the building was slowly waking.

Soon, three residents gathered around a small round table and the pair jumped into their presentation. Minkah demonstrated the utility of the emergency supplies with ease. 

It was not her first rodeo. 

Minkah was in New Orleans for years following the devastation of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. She helped with response efforts in Haiti after the country’s catastrophic earthquake and was dispatched to Puerto Rico following the string of natural disasters in 2017.

“It’s who I am,” Minkah said. “I’m a helper.”

Following a disaster declaration, FEMA denied Delaware’s request for individual assistance funds, which would have gone directly to residents impacted by the Hurricane Ida flooding. 

FEMA determined that the impact to New Castle County individuals and households was not of the “severity and magnitude” to warrant individual assistance funds, according to an October 2021 county news release. 

“That’s really where this got complicated for the state’s disaster recovery,” said Paige Fitzgerald, deputy director of the Delaware Emergency Management Agency. 

In total, 233 residences were impacted by the flooding with 11.3% of them living below the poverty line, according to a FEMA damage report. The total individual assistance cost estimate was over $1.2 million.

FEMA approved at least $2.3 million for public assistance, hazard mitigation grant programs and Small Business Administration aid. 

MaryAnn Tierney, regional administrator for FEMA Region 3, which covers the mid-Atlantic area, said that the agency is constantly working to identify gaps in preparedness while anticipating requirements that may arise if another natural disaster were to strike. The impact of disasters is disproportionately felt in marginalized communities, Tierney said. 

“What happened in Delaware is a highlight of why equity needs to be front of mind when it comes to disaster response, because the people who were disproportionately impacted were folks [who were] extremely socially vulnerable,” Tierney said.

DEMA is working on a disaster recovery plan to better utilize existing resources, programs and funds to sustain the state in the wake of a disaster, if federal assistance doesn’t arrive or is insufficient, Fitzgerald said. The agency is working on a disaster housing project with the Delaware State Housing Authority and Delaware Department of Health and Social Services. 

The Hurricane Ida flooding showed DEMA that they need to push a more comprehensive preparedness message that tailors information to specific countywide and local communities. 

“The strength that the Resilience Hub has had so far is that they’re personalizing that process for people,” Fitzgerald said. “The Resilience Hub is helping people really see what their path to preparedness should be.”

On a recent evening, Henry finished her presentation at the Village of St. John. The residents thanked her as she packed the emergency supplies and loaded up her rolling canvas cart. 

The seniors around the table finished their dinner and headed up to their rooms for the night. Henry wheeled her emergency preparedness cart out of the housing complex and into the night. 

There were more people left to teach.