Repeat flooding is creating public health crisis in Detroit: ‘Long-term trauma’

Ethan Bakuli reported this story while participating in USC Annenberg’s Center for Climate Journalism and Communication and Center for Health Journalism 2025 Health and Climate Change Reporting Fellowship as well as a Solutions Journalism Network accelerator program for coverage of the health impacts of seasonal climate issues in Metro Detroit.

In the waning days of June 2021, a torrent of rain entered Jennine Spencer-Gilbert’s Field Street home. She watched the walls of her century-old home peel as 7 inches of rain fell in Detroit in the span of two days.

Beyond the initial water damage, Spencer-Gilbert faced another problem. 

“We had to get as much of the mold out as we could, sanitizing appliances, furnaces, washing machines, dryers — you name it,” Spencer-Gilbert recalls. Her Ford Escape became caked with black mold after rain leaked in through the sunroof, and was totaled.

Spencer-Gilbert estimates her home has flooded four times in the last decade. Each time, she’s had to clean mold in her basement with bleach to ensure it doesn’t aggravate her preexisting asthma. 

“You have to make sure your house is fumigated and clean,” she said. “So you can continue to keep living there.”

Frequent and heavy rainstorms have become a regular occurrence across Southeast Michigan and its largest city, Detroit. The region witnessed over $2 billion in flooding damage to houses, businesses, and roadways in recent years, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). 

The health effects of flooding can linger long after the water recedes, and threaten the wellbeing of the region’s 4.8 million residents.

Across the area’s cities and towns, experts say, residents are suffering through the physical and psychological impacts of recurring flooding and sewage backups. 

“Every person in Detroit is at risk for flooding – every single household,” said Peter Larson, an epidemiologist at the University of Michigan who has studied household flooding in Detroit over the last decade.

In addition to the June 2021 storm, two other federally declared disasters occurred in Southeast Michigan in recent history, in August 2014 and August 2023.

Even without three 100-year storms inside of a decade, the region’s century-old stormwater infrastructure, flat topography, and impervious concrete contributes to the frequency of flooding and other climate emergencies.

Since 1951, total annual precipitation has increased by 14% across the Great Lakes region, while annual precipitation in Southeast Michigan has increased by 6.2 inches, or 20%, in that same time span, according to the Great Lakes Integrated Sciences + Assessments Center. 

“A lot of the stormwater infrastructure, especially in our older cities, is not designed for this new climate, and so it easily overwhelms some of those systems,” said Aaron Ferguson, program manager with Michigan’s Climate Health Adaptation Program.

 “When it rains like an inch or more in a short amount of time, we see a lot of street flooding, and it backs up into people’s basements.”

The Michigan Department of Health and Human Services (MDHHS), which houses the Climate Health Adaptation Program, has been observing long-term climate trends through data collected by the NOAA. 

States west of Michigan are “projected to get drier,” Ferguson said, while the Great Lakes State is expected to see more precipitation.

A 2020 report by the Southeast Michigan Council of Governments projects that by the middle of the century the region will experience an average of 5.2 inches of rain in a 10-year, 24-hour event.

The increase in extreme precipitation events over the last century, experts say, are a result of warming surface temperatures, which increase the heat and moisture in the atmosphere needed for storms.

Flooding as a public health issue

Detroit’s combined sewer overflow system, in which the sewage and stormwater flow in the same pipe, can process 1.5 to 3 inches in a 24-hour period, according to city documents.

In the June 2021 flood, power outages and pump station failures contributed toward sewage backups in homes across the city, according to a 2022 report from the Great Lakes Water Authority.  

Water intrusion into homes — through leaks in roofs, windows, pipes, or where there has been a flood — has the potential to contribute to mold and microbial growth that can cause or exacerbate respiratory symptoms, according to city and federal documents. 

In a survey of Detroit homes between 2012 and 2020, Larson and other researchers found that four out of five households that flooded had mold in their basements, in addition to other structural problems like a leaky roof or foundation cracks.

Despite the growing attention to flooding in the region and across the United States, it’s “still perceived to be an exclusively economic issue,” not “a major public health issue,” Larson said.

“There’s serious mental health outcomes that are understudied and poorly understood,” Larson said. 

Larson’s own interest in the health impacts of flooding traces back to witnessing roughly 13 feet of water fill his childhood home in Jackson, Mississippi in the late 1970s. 

“To this day I don’t leave things on the floor in the basement. I try to keep all my stuff on the second floor … that (fear) never went away, even though I live on a hill.”

The Climate Health Adaptation Program’s Ferguson said the emotional and psychological stress from flooding is drawing more scrutiny and attention.

MDHHS works to provide educational material and technical assistance for public health officials to study the effects of climate change in local communities, he said.

The city offers general advice on how to control the spread of mold and prepare in the event of a flood on its website. 

Detroit’s top public health official referenced the city’s mold problem in remarks last month.

“We know that the conditions that people live in show up in their outcomes, whether that’s asthma from mold or dampness, whether that’s injuries from unsafe structures or the daily strain that families carry as a result of having that concern on their mind from unsafe structures they live in,” Detroit Chief Public Health Officer Ali Abazeed said at an April press conference about a coordinated enforcement strategy for unsafe residential buildings.

‘Long-term trauma’ in Macomb County from 4-hour rain event

The repeat flooding – from rainstorms and water main breaks– that has battered the city of Detroit is a regional concern. When a major rainstorm struck Aug. 11, 2014, as much as 6 inches of rain fell in a four-hour window in Macomb County, which borders Detroit and Lake St. Clair. 

The storm caused roughly $1.8 billion in flood-related damage to homes, businesses, and infrastructure, according to the National Weather Service.

Andrew Cox, director of Health and Community Services for Macomb County, worked at the county’s call center in weeks after the storm, collecting assessments from households that suffered property damages. 

“It was the first, that I remember, natural weather event response that I had been part of,” said Cox.

Over the weeks the call center was live, Cox said it became clear “there was much more there talking to people and just hearing the losses of items, losses of things that they experience” as residents relived the flooding event.

In 2017, he partnered with other county health department staff to conduct a retrospective survey of over 400 people who contacted the Macomb County call center three years prior.

Over half of respondents reported experiencing anxiety, more than a quarter experienced depression, and 11% described experiencing post-traumatic stress following the 2014 flood, according to the study. 

The survey additionally found that high income households have more capacity for emergency preparedness in the event of a flood, and that households with high emergency preparedness have lower levels of mental health outcomes.

“It takes a lot of resources to look at that, but we have to, because for people that experience these climate emergencies, it’s not just ‘OK, you’re good in two weeks,’” said Cox.

“That is just long-term trauma that we still have with people that’s a result of just one event that was four hours long.” 

Floods ‘gasoline on the fire’ of aging housing, poverty

In the aftermath of a 54-inch water main break in Southwest Detroit in February 2025, physician Richard Bryce attended to several people struggling to recover. 

Patients reiterated stories of wading through freezing water and staying in their homes without electricity or heat.

“Many of my patients would be talking about trying to save all their things the best they could, but then also be safe,” he said. 

Bryce splits his time between clinics in Southwest Detroit and on the city’s east side. Both areas experience recurring street and basement flooding. 

From his vantage point, Bryce said it’s difficult to “pinpoint somebody’s worsening asthma only to mold.”

Given the age of housing stock and poverty rates across Detroit, it’s apparent that frequent rain events are only adding to his patients’ financial, physical, and emotional burden, Bryce said.

“There were probably already houses that were dealing with mold issues to begin with,” he said. “Now you have a flood and it’s just like gasoline on the fire.”

‘All that rain came into our houses’

Spencer-Gilbert has lived away from Field Street for five years of her life, shortly after giving birth to her first daughter. Beyond that, she’s always felt called to be in the east side Islandview neighborhood, a 5-minute drive from the Detroit River. 

Spencer-Gilbert purchased the house next to her childhood home when she returned to Islandview. She said she was encouraged by neighbors and elders to become the president of the Field Street Block Club, and welcomes the opportunity to serve her community. 

In the days, weeks, and months after the June 2021 flood, Spencer-Gilbert assisted her neighbors on Field Street in cleaning up and replacing lost materials. 

“We tried to get the debris in front of the sewer, and we kept digging down with long sticks and poles,” she said. “All that rain came into our houses. Our basements flooded and all the nursing homes and stuff along the (Grand) Boulevard.”

Among the list of home repairs that Spencer-Gilbert envisioned when she moved back to Field Street, none of them involved basement flooding. Now she’s anticipating when she might raise the money needed to repair the foundation of her home, which has shifted over the years. 

Residents of Islandview are contending with a variety of issues like gentrification and proximity to industrial pollution. Flooding and sewage backups appear to be another recurring problem with no end in sight without systemic infrastructure improvements. 

“Everybody was in disarray,” Spencer-Gilbert of the 2021 flood.

“It was depressing. I was sad, not just for me, but for my community, because I literally had seniors sick and shut in on my block that didn’t have access to anything.”

Spencer-Gilbert is invested in protecting her entire block, not just her home., she said. When funding for roof and porch repairs becomes available, she directs other Islandview residents to apply.

It’s “a village” that nurtured her as a child growing up through the city’s drug epidemics and other difficult moments, Spencer-Gilbert told Planet Detroit. 

“The safe haven was never inside my home, it was always outside, where the neighbors were barbecuing, the kids were playing together, and the elders were planting their gardens,” she said. 

“We were family. We fought – all of that – but if you were in need, they were there and protected you, and that’s what brought me back to Field Street.”