Long-desired flooding relief may finally reach Southbridge

Why Should Delaware Care?
Relief to a decades-long flooding problem is finally coming to one of Wilmington’s oldest and most historic neighborhoods. Residents say the efforts are long overdue as communities across the state similarly grapple with flooding stemming from rising sea levels. 

Almost everyone in Wilmington’s Southbridge neighborhood has a flooding story. 

Floodwaters have totaled cars and perpetually inundated basements in the majority low-income and low-lying neighborhood that’s nearly surrounded by the Christina River. Southbridge has been plagued with chronic flooding for years, with the issue only expected to worsen with rising sea levels. 

The constant flooding has saddled the neighborhood’s roughly 1,000 residents with incessant mosquitos, moldy basements and costly flood insurance premiums.

About 90% of the lower-lying south side of the neighborhood lies within the 100-year floodplain of the Christina River. The neighborhood street plan, which was laid out in a grid pattern for future development, was never realized because of the community’s marshy terrain. 

Now, efforts to reduce the flooding in the historic neighborhood are beginning to take hold. While Southbridge residents welcome the long-awaited relief, some say it’s overdue. 

Flooding resulting from an antiquated sewer and stormwater system has been afflicting neighborhood residents for decades, with specific issues and solutions being formally detailed in a 2006 South Wilmington drainage study. 

Sewer separation work took 16 years to begin after it was identified as a solution in the study, while the Southbridge Wilmington Wetlands Park, which is meant to alleviate flooding, was completed in the same 16-year period. 

Separation work is expected to be completed in 2027, over 20 years after its need was first identified.  

“We’re always the last on everything,” said Robert Perkins, a lifelong Southbridge resident, about the separation work finally starting in the neighborhood. “They’ve been separating us for 40 years.” 

Perkins, 73, sat on his porch on a recent sunny afternoon as heavy industrial dump trucks trundled in front of his house. Nearby, Rick King, a Southbridge native, sat in his living room, a stone’s throw from Perkins’ porch. 

“There’s no excuse for the aqueducts not to be worked on in over 50 years,” King said.
“When (the city) found it out, there was no immediate push to get them done.”

King’s car was totaled while he was driving down South Claymont Street during a recent flood. He recalled seeing waves of water coming toward him before his car floated for about a block and a half. 

“To see the water, just the waves coming, it was almost like a cartoon because it was something you’d never expect to see,” King said. 

King loves the completed wetlands park but said that it’s something that should’ve been there a “long time ago.”

“For some reason, everything with Southbridge is just pushed back — always pushed to the side,” he added. 

City officials attribute the lengthy remediation process to a yearslong permitting and planning process, which included numerous meetings with state officials and residents. 

The perennial flooding is largely due to the neighborhood’s aging sewer system that combines sanitary and stormwater runoff. As a result, the sewer system overflows through manhole covers and street sewer inlets, leading to flooding when it rains or the river overflows its banks. 

Work on separating the sewage and stormwater drainage pipes has already been completed in one part of the neighborhood, with more slated to begin this fall. The completion of the long-awaited wetlands park and a new flooding mitigation grant are expected to reduce flooding in the coming years.

The initial idea for a wetlands park was discussed in the 2006 study, with the space finally being completed in 2022. The $26 million park was created to reduce flooding in the neighborhood while giving residents a new recreational space. 

Roughly 17,000 tons of contaminated soil was removed from the area to build the park that serves as a stormwater management facility and touts the restoration of the once contaminated, drained 14-acre wetlands.

It now holds over 2 million gallons of stormwater to mitigate flooding in the neighborhood and connects residents to the nearby shopping center through a boardwalk. 

Bobbie Foote-Page, a Southbridge resident of over 50 years, walked on the wooden boardwalk planks on a recent afternoon. Birds fluttered between cattails as the sun shone on the marshland. 

Foote-Page recalled her basement being chronically flooded when she was growing up in the neighborhood. Her family would use a mobile water pump to flush the water out of the basement and onto the street, which was a time-consuming process. 

“It seemed as if the more you pumped out the water, the more it came in,” she said. 

Over the years, Foote-Page would see extreme flooding in the neighborhood anywhere from 10 to 20 times per year. In the last five years, however, she’s only had to pump water out of her basement once. 

Foote-Page is excited about the flooding remediation progress that’s being made but remains concerned about how the ongoing flooding will affect Southbridge’s remaining residents. 

The Southbridge Wilmington Wetlands Park helps to contain and redirect floodwaters away from Southbridge’s aging infrastructure, but more work must still be done. | SPOTLIGHT DELAWARE PHOTO BY JOSE IGNACIO CASTANEDA PEREZ

The park and the sewer separation were “very complex” civil engineering projects with respect to design and construction that took many years to come together, according to Vince Carroccia, deputy commissioner of public works for the city of Wilmington. 

The city had to obtain numerous state and federal permits to excavate an existing wetland, which resulted in years of meetings with the Delaware Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control alongside the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers before final approval was granted, Carroccia said in a written statement. 

The projects included multiple years of meetings with the Southbridge community to keep residents informed and to get community input. As a result of the meetings, there were design changes and additional studies that were not anticipated.

Combined sewer and stormwater systems are typical of cities that were designed over 100 years ago, according to Bruce Jones, project manager with Wilmington’s Department of Public Works. Jones is overseeing the Southbridge pipe separation project. 

“Over time, as cities have developed, there’s more rain coming into the pipe and the pipes no longer have the capacity to carry all the sewage and all the rain water,” Jones said. “That’s the problem that Southbridge has been dealing with for 50 plus years.” 

The project will build a new stormwater pipe system for storm runoff and continue to use the existing sewer pipe for sanitary purposes. Construction on Southbridge’s A Street pipe system finished at the end of 2023. 

“By separating that flow, we now have adequate capacity so that the water doesn’t flow up onto the street anymore,” Jones said.

Construction on B and C streets is expected to begin in October with the project slated to last until the fall of 2027, comprising a three-year endeavor. The B Street separation is expected to last 16 months from 2024-2026, while the C Street separation will take 19 months from 2025-2027. 

The city was able to bundle construction on B and C streets due to a $4.8 million water infrastructure community grant administered by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The federal grant projects were designated for the “planning, design, and construction of drinking

water, wastewater, and stormwater infrastructure and for water quality protection.” 

The separation project was initially supposed to be carried out in three phases, but the grant allowed for B and C streets to be completed together, Jones said. 

In April, the City of Wilmington received a $333,558 grant from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration for the Southbridge East Habitat Restoration Planning Project. 

The project will create designs for the restoration and enhancement of nearly 13 acres of degraded wetland habitat along the Christina River in Southbridge. The designs will then help the community reduce flooding and enhance resiliency while improving water quality in the river. 

As Foote-Page spoke at the wetlands park, a deer and its fawn pranced through the marshland behind her. The bushy-tailed pair navigated through the water and tallgrass of the park meant to relieve flooding in Foote-Page’s neighborhood.

“Usually it’s a whole family,” she said. 

Have a question about or feedback on this story? Reach José Ignacio Castañeda Perez at jcastaneda@spotlightdelaware.org.

The post Long-desired flooding relief may finally reach Southbridge appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.