Delco and Philly residents feel ‘abandoned’ as Trump admin cuts grants meant to protect area from flooding

Bringing attention and resources to the Eastwick neighborhood and surrounding areas was no small task.

Brenda Whitfield, who has lived in the Southwest Philadelphia neighborhood for five decades and raised her children there, recalled years of fighting for attention and feeling as though the community was ignored and taken advantage of by politicians. In the flood-prone area, the environmental justice problems went from A to Z, Whitfield said.

Solutions finally felt within the community’s grasp in recent years with increased federal resources — until President Donald Trump’s administration began canceling grants.

“I felt like crying and said, no, we’ve come too far for you to do this to us now,” Whitfield said.

“We have worked so hard to bring people to the table, not realizing … that it would be snatched away.”

Under former President Joe Biden’s administration, federal grant funds came through to establish temporary solutions for flooding in Eastwick, and the Army Corps of Engineers was studying a levee on the left bank of Cobbs Creek that could alleviate the flooding permanently. Across the county line, Delaware County secured a technical assistance grant from the Federal Emergency Management Agency last year to plan solutions for exacerbated flooding the county could experience as a result of water pushed by the planned levee.

But the Delco program was canceled in April alongside $1 million in environmental justice grants to Philadelphia, much of which was slated for Eastwick.

“It’s an abandonment,” said Delaware County Council member Elaine Schaefer, a Democrat. “The federal government has abandoned our local community, and the decisions that are being made right now are just completely upside down and really have no understanding of how things work in local communities.”

In the Darby Creek Valley, residents and leaders are trying to find their own path forward, as are dozens of other communities across the nation facing similar cuts.

The grant eliminations came as the Trump administration slashed its way through federal spending programs, backing away from Biden-era climate policies and rejecting funds it deemed earmarked for “diversity, equity, and inclusion.” Meanwhile, Trump is reorganizing and contemplating eliminating FEMA even amid devastating flooding in Texas.

As of August the Army Corps of Engineers was still moving forward with the levee study, but completion of the project could be complicated by lost resources to mitigate flooding in Delaware County. And temporary barriers funded in Eastwick to mitigate flooding in the meantime are moving forward as of August.

But residents and local leaders worry that the progress they have worked toward for years will evaporate as they search for alternative funds to continue and safeguard the work.

When Whitfield moved into her Eastwick home in the 1970s, she had no idea it had been built on a floodplain. She was a young mother excited to raise her family in a good community.

Two decades later, Hurricane Floyd dumped five to six feet of water in her basement in 1999, and she began to realize the extent of the flooding problem.

In 2019, during Trump’s first term, the Environmental Protection Agency began working to enlarge Cobbs Creek, a tributary of Darby Creek, behind Whitfield’s home, completing the project in 2023.

“I could not believe that I could sleep in a heavy rain and not have anxiety,” Whitfield recalled.

But the problem keeps getting worse amid climate change.

Jaclyn Rhoads, who lives in Delaware County and is president of the Darby Creek Valley Association, said severe flooding in the area seems to occur annually, whereas 10 years ago such events came every five to 10 years.

“Repeat flood events have occurred for some properties to the point where they’ve become unlivable,” Rhoads said. “There’s still more homes that are experiencing this that this grant would have helped to identify some of the solutions.”

The current work, Rhoads said, had been years in the making as the need was recognized. Halting the study halts solutions for those families and homeowners.

“By cutting the funding now, we can’t look at those options, we can’t see what works and what doesn’t work, and essentially means that you’re not going to have any kind of solution in the near future,” she said.

“People in the community are trying to make changes, and it is beneficial, but it’s not enough.”

Last year Delaware County secured a technical assistance grant from FEMA, giving the county access to the agency’s experts and consultants to coordinate among several jurisdictions affected by flooding — a service that would have been extremely costly for the community to obtain on its own.

The agency had brought on consultants who, said Gina Burritt, Delco’s director of planning, had developed a rapport with the community as they charted a path forward.

The loss of that resource leaves the county on its own to fund and explore solutions.

“Not having their technical expertise is something that is really hard to replace,” Burritt said.

Delaware County received a grant from the William Penn Foundation to conduct some studies of flooding in the area, but Burritt said it represents just a fraction of the work FEMA was providing.

The technical assistance was viewed as a precursor to a Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities grant that would have funded the solutions, but the Trump administration canceled the BRIC program on the grounds that it focused too much on climate change rather than disaster response, according to Grist, a nonprofit news organization that covers climate. Earlier this month, a federal judge blocked the Trump administration from reallocating the BRIC funds but did not mandate the administration restore the program.

Now, it’s unclear where the funding will come from for Delaware County communities.

“It will take a lot longer, and in the end I’m not sure the resources will be there,” Schaefer said.

“I wish that the decision-makers who have decided to end this program could go spend two days in Eastwick and in Darby and see the devastation that has happened to these neighborhoods storm after storm.”

FEMA pulling out will delay work, said Tanya Allen, a Democrat who chairs the borough council in Sharon Hill. The result, she worries, will be worse flooding in the borough’s business district and in neighborhoods near the creek.

“In the midst of waiting for the plans to just be started, we are sustaining the hits from these weather events,” she said. “It’s unnerving.”

The region, Schaefer said, desperately needs meaningful flooding solutions and the type that takes long-term planning and significant investment.

“It is disastrous now,” she said. “Homes have devastating flooding now, so the timeline is yesterday when we need to take action.”

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ levee project could also be complicated by the canceled Delco work, as the agency’s regulations block it from moving forward with the project if it cannot solve flooding caused by displaced water, said U.S. Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon, a Democrat whose district includes Delaware County and Eastwick.

According to Scanlon’s staff, the funding for the Army Corps of Engineers project is secured but additional expenses could be pushed off to Philadelphia or Delaware County to mitigate flooding in Delco.

Scanlon’s office has played a key role in getting federal agencies to the table and coordinating across county lines alongside FEMA. She said the state and local governments will have more pressure to handle the region’s flooding alone. But there is not enough money to go around.

“Our state and city resources, state and municipal resources, are going to be in short supply in the immediate future because of so many things that the White House is trying to cut,” Scanlon said.

Scanlon recalled finding a fish in someone’s front yard when she visited neighborhoods in 2018.

“It was a real visual representation of just how bad the problem was,” Scanlon said, noting that rolling back federal climate change policies alongside these grants was particularly irresponsible in the current moment.

For her part, Whitfield is convinced something has to give. The loss of federal funds, she said, felt like the rug being pulled out from under her. But she is determined to continue to work with her community to find a new and continuing source.

“I’m still waiting for that change to come. I’m still waiting for politicians to realize that we put them in office to protect us and to keep us safe — and are you doing your part to make that happen?”