‘Don’t let us die down here’: A year later, a look at Hurricane Ida’s devastation of the Philly area

From a low-slung brick building in Mount Holly, Brian Haines, a 34-year-old science and operations officer for the National Weather Service, tracked Hurricane Ida after it made landfall in Louisiana on Aug. 26, 2021. With Category 4 strength and winds of 150 mph, the storm had arrived, coincidentally, on the 16th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina.

After cutting a deadly path through the Gulf Coast, Ida, now a tropical depression, lurched toward the East Coast. Haines and his colleagues watched computer models that showed Ida collide with a frontal system near the Appalachians. They reached a chilling conclusion: The storm, which cast a shadow from West Virginia to I-95, from Maryland to New Jersey, was regaining strength. Ida was expected to reach the Philadelphia area on Sept. 1.

“Oh my God,” Haines would remember thinking. “There’s going to be people who are not going to survive this.”

Rain had already started to fall across Philadelphia by the time Dominick Mireles huddled with his team in the early afternoon on Sept. 1.

Mireles, 33 with close-cropped dark hair, was deputy director of the city’s Office of Emergency Management. In a sleek, bunkerlike room on Spring Garden Street near Third, he’d spent nearly a week preparing for Ida.

The 2021 Atlantic hurricane season had produced 21 storms, the third-most on record, including Henri, a tropical depression that deposited nearly two inches of precipitation on the city in late August.

And now Ida was on its way. On Aug. 30, National Weather Service officials warned the city about the damage the storm might inflict. Mireles activated the city’s severe weather plan, which put dozens of local agencies on high alert.

Meteorological data promised rain and flooding. But how much was still an open question.

“At that point,” Mireles would later say, “we’re still not entirely sure, ‘Is this going to happen, or not?’”

About 30 miles to the northwest, Joe Dishler worked through a quiet ritual. A volunteer firefighter since age 16, Dishler, 48, was the leader of Montgomery County’s Urban Search and Rescue Team. His 17-member crew needed to be ready for whatever chaos the storm could unleash.

Dishler pulled on a dry suit and ankle-supported boots, and gathered a knife, flashlight, and whistle. He made sure chain saws had been fueled and filled the front of his truck with food, extra batteries, and smart devices.

An unspoken tension rippled through his team. Their families were in the storm’s path, too.

At 5:01 p.m., as the rain grew heavier, some of Dishler’s crew were dispatched to water rescues in Upper Merion and West Norriton, where flooding had been reported.

“Every call counts,” Dishler would later say. “If you underestimate the power of water, you die.”

About 15 minutes later, Dishler received a call from his boss, who blurted, “Where are you?”

The question carried more than a hint of alarm.

On a gently curved street in Fort Washington, Upper Dublin Township, Connie Haggard glanced outside the home that she and her husband, Dick, had shared for 54 years.

“The sky looks unreal,” she would remember thinking.

She switched her television to 6ABC, and listened to meteorologist Cecily Tynan warn that tornadoes might strike a handful of communities that were highlighted on a map.

“It said Upper Dublin!” Haggard, 86, told her husband.

The couple swung open their basement door — adorned with a poster of the Muppets — and headed down, clutching a flashlight and a phone.

The storm outside grew stronger, accompanied by a sound that the Haggards had never before heard. “Like a freight train coming,” Connie would explain. “Louder. Louder.”

The lights in their house blinked off. Upstairs, something crashed.

A tornado — an EF-2 on the Enhanced Fujita scale — had touched down in Upper Dublin. Dishler, who lived nearby, was sent to the site of this unexpected disaster. More than 100 homes would be deemed uninhabitable.

“A tornado? In Upper Dublin? It didn’t make any sense,” Dishler later recalls thinking.

Connie Haggard soon heard pounding on her front door — neighbors were checking to see if she was hurt. Five pine trees on her property had been snapped in half and launched through the ceiling of the room where she’d just been watching TV.

A massive oak tree had also collapsed onto her neighbor’s house. Dishler and his crew began searching the mangled property for survivors.

Maxine Weinstein, a 68-year-old mother of three, had been inside with her husband, Stan, when a tornado warning alert began to sound. Weinstein had been knitting, and at first didn’t believe that a tornado would actually strike their area, her brother later recalled.

Inside, Dishler’s team made a grim discovery: Weinstein, a tenderhearted advocate for autism awareness, had been killed by the fallen tree.

Ida had claimed its first victim in the Philadelphia area — but not its last.

While a tornado tore through Upper Dublin, Zach Messinger was on the phone with his father, Craig, a bespectacled 70-year-old optician with a snowy beard and gray hair.

Each week, the two had plans to meet for dinner. On Sept. 1, they intended to try an Outback Steakhouse at the Montgomery Mall, a few hours before their favorite baseball team — the Atlanta Braves — was set to play the Los Angeles Dodgers. They had plenty to discuss; the Braves were making a surprising run toward the playoffs, and the Philadelphia Eagles, Craig’s favorite football team, were inching close to their season opener.

Earlier in the week, Zach, 38, had suggested postponing the dinner because of Ida. Now, as the storm worsened, he pleaded with his father to reschedule.

Craig, a father of two and grandfather of six, relented. He agreed to leave his Montgomeryville business, Philadelphia Eyeglasses Lab, and head to his home in Schwenksville.

After 6 minutes and 37 seconds, Zach and his father ended their call. Craig started what normally would be a half-hour drive.

Shortly after 6 p.m., Michael Stellato bounced through turbulent, brown-as-dirt water, on what were once asphalt roads, in a 14-foot inflatable rubber rescue boat.

Stellato, deputy special operations coordinator for Bucks County Emergency Services, had been on the rescue team for four years but had never seen rain so fierce, so unforgiving.

Twisterlike winds jostled Stellato and his crew of three volunteers back and forth as they made their way to a bridge on North Main Street in Sellersville where three women, two men, and an infant were stranded. Water whipped past their shins, and was climbing fast.

“We took the three women and infant first, but we got stuck in the current on a guardrail,” he later recalled. They freed themselves by pushing off with firefighting pipe poles.

They returned for the two men, hauled them into the boat, but again got pinned against the guardrail.

“Our boat started taking on water,” Stellato said. They had no protection, swelling waters lashed against their bodies. They gripped the battered boat. By then, they were chest deep. “We were starting to float. We could no longer find the ground.”

The rescuers now had to be rescued.

» READ MORE: ‘I can’t get out’: These families lost their homes in Hurricane Ida. They’re stuck in hotels six months later.

Members of the Haycock Fire Company arrived. They set up a tension-line system with a rope that crossed diagonally over water from one guardrail to another, and ferried each person across into their boat. But then the boat crashed into a building, and struck a large submerged object. Everyone was flipped out into the swollen, angry water, which had risen up to 18 feet.

The rescuers held the two men, making sure they weren’t sucked down and swept downstream. Stellato, 40, held one man, a Marine veteran, between his legs, and pushed tree limbs and other objects away to protect him. At one point a Dumpster surged past them.

“That was nerve-racking,” he later recalled. “It’s hard to get out of the way of a Dumpster.”

They were able to scramble back into the boat, but it wasn’t long before their motor died. They started paddling — and then hit a tree. The boat started to sink. Another rescue boat, from the Delaware Valley Fire Company, came for them and took them to the Perkasie Firehouse, where a command center had been set up.

Stellato headed back out with two members of the Pennsylvania Fish and Boat Commission’s Swiftwater team. Their mission: Evacuate people from neighborhoods in Middletown that were completely submerged.

They read street signs, some two inches underwater, with flashlights.

They spotted one last stranded person. The man’s house was elevated, up on stilts in 10 feet of churning water, as tree limbs barreled into the pillars supporting the house. He stood on his deck looking for help, while his house shook from the force of the water.

Stellato’s team worried the man’s house would break free, and float away. “The water was too turbulent and too fast for us to get to him,” he later said. They called for a Helicopter Aquatic Rescue team and a specialist was lowered from a chopper to pick the man up.

Stellato and his team rescued 19 people that night. “All that goes through my head is keeping everybody safe,” he explained. “You really don’t have time to be nervous. You just keep going.”

Zach Messinger’s phone buzzed at 7:40 p.m. It was his stepmother, Lori.

His father, Craig, hadn’t made it home. But he’d called Lori several times before leaving her a voice message.

His words were world-shattering. Craig Messinger said he was drowning.

Craig’s body wouldn’t be found until the next day, in Skippack Township. A month later, when the Braves won the World Series, and he wasn’t able to share the moment of joy with his father, Zach’s heart ached.

He would have his father’s name engraved on a brick outside the Braves’ stadium, Truist Park. “I miss you so much,” he wrote on Facebook.

About 8 p.m., Kate and Donald Bauer climbed into their Mazda CX-9 SUV and began what should have been a half-hour drive from DeSales University’s campus, in Center Valley, to their home in Perkiomenville.

The Bauers had visited DeSales to watch their daughter, Sophie, play in a volleyball game with her team from Moravian University.

Donald, a longtime volleyball coach and enthusiast, gave his daughter a pep talk after the game — “You can do this,” he told her — and then insisted on finding a tractor supply store. He’d wanted to buy a sump pump for Kate’s mother, in case Ida flooded her property.

The rain was falling as much as three inches per hour, and the Bauers soon found main roads were becoming impassable. Donald loved adventure but knew it was too dangerous to chance driving across a flooded highway. He and his wife called their son, Darby, as they sought a safe route home.

Eventually, they ended up on an unfamiliar road in Milford Township, Bucks County, unaware that they were next to the surging Unami Creek, which cuts through Lehigh, Bucks, and Montgomery Counties.

“All of a sudden,” Kate would later say, “a wall of water hit us, and killed the engine.”

» READ MORE: A timeline of Ida's Philly destruction

Within moments, the water had risen halfway up the side of their Mazda. Kate and Donald tried to figure out what they should do — and then the floodwaters swept away their SUV.

The Mazda struck a telephone pole, the impact shattering its rear window. And then the SUV was pulled into the 16.5-mile-long creek, where it bounced off boulders and pitched forward.

“Undo your seat belt,” Donald Bauer told his wife.

The rear window was their only chance at survival. Kate, 55, an avid swimmer, wasn’t afraid of the water. But Donald had always been wary of oceans and rivers.

He placed his hand on the small of his wife’s back, and shouted “Go! Go!”

Kate escaped. Donald was caught in his seat belt.

It was dark, and rain was falling in sheets. Kate grabbed onto a tree branch as the creek churned around her.

She called for help.

The branch began to break.

Kate said a prayer and let go.

She could no longer see Donald or their Mazda. She found another tree branch, and held on tight. “I was determined,” she later said, “determined that my kids wouldn’t lose both their parents in the same night.”

Kate remained stuck in the swirling floodwaters for an hour and a half, unaware that the Bucks County rescue team trying to come to her aid had, itself, needed to be rescued.

Finally, at 10:10 p.m., emergency workers pulled her from the creek. “I was numb,” she’d recall. Kate had hypothermia, and her muscles were at risk of deteriorating, and slipping into her bloodstream, because they’d been contracting for so long.

Emergency workers found Donald Bauer’s body in his SUV the following day. His family would describe him as a guy who was preternaturally interested in helping other people, someone who, during the COVID-19 pandemic, was prone to exclaim, “Get the damn vaccine and wear a mask!”

Now, at 65, he was gone.

In Philadelphia, Ida’s impact through much of that first day seemed muted, unlike the overlapping crises unfolding in the city’s surrounding counties.

A handful of shelters had opened but were receiving few visitors. The Schuylkill was expected to crest at 14 feet, just below major flood stage. Mireles left the Office of Emergency Management’s headquarters about 9 p.m., believing the situation was stable enough for him to head home for a few hours.

At 11 p.m., his phone rang. Another emergency official had news: The forecast had changed significantly.

Mireles opened his laptop and stared at a chart that showed the Schuylkill was going to rise to 16 feet. Later, that prediction was updated to more than 17 feet, a level not seen since 1869.

A decade’s worth of population growth and construction had already helped make the city more prone to flooding; 54% of the surfaces within the local watersheds — which includes the Delaware River and the Schuylkill, and five creeks — are considered impervious.

Within a 12-hour period, some parts of the city were pounded with more than five inches of rain.

Mireles convened a midnight call with Mayor Jim Kenney and other officials, and the National Guard was summoned to the city. As the Schuylkill’s murky waters rose, the Fire Department would respond to more than 100 calls for water rescues.

At least 40 people were evacuated from Venice Island, a narrow slice of land nestled between the Schuylkill and the Manayunk Canal, and home to large apartment buildings. Kiersten Frenchu, a 31-year-old physician at Temple University, peered through her fourth-floor window inside The Isle apartments.

“The water was right there,” she’d later recall. “If you were in the lobby and looked out the window, it was just a sheet of muddy brown water.”

At 1:09 a.m., Mireles directed his department to issue a wireless emergency alert that echoed on cell phones across the city, warning that the Schuylkill had reached a major flood stage. It was unclear, though, how many people would see the alert in the middle of the night, or bother to lift up their phones.

Neither Mireles nor his peers realized that floodwaters would completely overtake I-676, transforming miles of the highway into an apocalyptic glimpse of an unstoppable weather disaster, forcing schools and businesses to close.

Jack Caroluzzi woke up in the bedroom of his Bridgeport home at 1:30 a.m. to howling wind and rain pelting against the windows. He looked outside. Water raced down Third Street so fast that it was bypassing storm drains.

Caroluzzi stepped outside in a downpour with a rake, and tried to unclog the metal drain slats.

“It never crossed our minds that we were in any kind of danger with this flood,” his wife, Laura Caroluzzi, later said.

Jack, who was 65 and had recently been diagnosed with liver cancer, came back inside, at his wife’s insistence, but went into the basement, first to retrieve bags of kitty litter and paper products. The water was rising fast. He made several trips.

“Jack, it’s time to stop,” Laura said.

“I’m going down one more time. I’ll be right back up,” he responded.

» READ MORE: Towns hit by Ida are buying water rescue boats and applying for grants, but ‘there’s no one solution’ for severe flooding

Suddenly all the smoke detectors went off. Laura crept down the basement steps, screaming his name. No answer.

The water was almost all the way up to the ceiling joists, with just a few inches to spare. She swam into the murky water, clawing for his limbs, then came back up to gasp for air. She repeated the dive, over and over.

She couldn’t find him.

“Help me! Somebody help me!” Laura screamed. “Don’t let us die down here!″

When the air pockets were almost gone, Laura, 53, tried to get her bearings. She saw electrical wires. “I thought, OK, this is how I’m going to die. I’m going to get electrocuted.”

She stretched her hands out and felt air, then found a wood pole, a banister to the staircase. “Somehow I found my way out, but I remember going up the stairs knowing my husband of 31 years was still in the water and there was nothing I could do.”

Caroluzzi’s body was recovered later in the day.

Their three-story rented home was condemned. Both cars were destroyed.

Laura Caroluzzi stayed at a hotel for several months after Ida struck, but she couldn’t afford the expense indefinitely. In the spring, she would begin staying at a friend’s house in Gilbertsville.

“I’m trying desperately to pick up the pieces, but I’m struggling a lot,” she said.

When the floodwaters finally receded, Ida’s toll began to come into focus, and with it a sense that the city and its suburbs must do more to prepare for a future that will be shaped by rising sea levels and more frequent extreme weather episodes.

Downingtown, Chester County, received 10.1 inches of rain, the most in the area. It was there that rescue workers found a fifth person who had died during the height of the storm on Sept. 1: Michael Nastasi, a 51-year-old former New York police officer and father of two, whose Dodge Ram was overtaken by floodwaters from the Marsh Creek.

Nine days after Ida barreled through Southeastern Pennsylvania, President Joe Biden declared Philadelphia and its nearby counties to be federal disaster zones. The National Hurricane Center, in a report published months later, estimated the storm inflicted up to $3.5 billion worth of damage on the state.

FEMA received more than 83,000 requests for assistance from Pennsylvanians. The agency, along with the U.S. Small Business Administration, and the National Flood insurance Program, issued $265 million worth of funding, including $88 million earmarked just for housing assistance. (Philadelphia also doled out more than $328,000 to 62 businesses hurt by the storm.)

In May, the city updated its hazard mitigation plan for the first time in five years, adding sea-level rise to the list of environmental challenges that it will face in the coming years.

Neighborhoods with high population density, like Center City, West Philadelphia, and South Philadelphia, are considered more likely to sustain losses in a disaster, while the city’s deep poverty means many families would struggle to recover.

» READ MORE: People in the Philly region are ‘still reeling’ emotionally from Hurricane Ida. Now, more rain is coming.

Pennsylvania, the report notes, is one of the most flood-prone states in the nation.

In Bucks County, emergency workers performed more than 50 water rescues during Ida.

“I wish I could say we were 100% ready for whatever was going to come our way that night,” said Audrey Kenny, Bucks County’s director of emergency services. “But I was here for Hurricane Sandy when it hit the county, and there were parallels between the two — just the sheer number of calls that came in, and the number of people who were out in their cars or out of their houses and in places that were not safe.”

For some, flood and weather notifications can be easy to ignore, even in the face of a big storm; cell phones and personal devices, after all, are perpetually chiming with updates and intrusions. That’s one reason that, in Ida’s wake, the National Weather Service is exploring other means of sharing urgent alerts with residents and government officials, Brian Haines said.

Philadelphia officials, too, are planning a pilot program that will allow flooding messages to be targeted to specific neighborhoods, and working to ensure that its alerts are easily accessible to immigrant communities. The city also received $98 million from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to help mitigate the impact extreme weather might have in the future on housing.

In Montgomery County, emergency workers — including Joe Dishler’s search and rescue team — saved 54 people during the storm, including three workers who were trapped in 60 feet of water in a flooded quarry.

Dishler said he’s since requested an additional rescue boat for his team and an emergency vehicle that could traverse damaged or obstructed roadways.

“The one-time storms,” he said, “aren’t a one-time thing anymore.”

Staff writer William Bender and researcher Ryan W. Briggs contributed to this article.