Heavy rains and flooding have hit the Pittsburgh region, and federal support is falling short. As climate changes, vulnerable communities are doing their best to keep up.
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North Versailles property owner Leah Lamonte is no rookie when it comes to dealing with floods. She owns two properties next to Crooked Run Creek, and has experienced flooding multiple times over the years. But she met her match this summer.
On June 6 and 16, floods left Lamonte’s properties with severe structural and utility damage, and displaced tenants for weeks. She called Township Manager Joseph Varhola, who, she said, told her: “You have to deal with your part of the creek. There’s nothing else we can do.”
Reached by Public Source this month, Varhola said he had been relaying a message he received from the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection.
“But what happens when there’s no more feasible solutions for a homeowner?” Lamonte asked rhetorically. “The weather has become so severe and there’s nothing left for us to do. You hope that the local government will go to bat for you on a community-wide level, but we often joke: ‘Superman isn’t showing up.’ And he doesn’t.”
The Pittsburgh region has been subjected to a string of severe weather events this year. On April 29, a thunderstorm killed three people and left thousands without power for days. Then July began with severe storms and flash floods and closed out as the third hottest on record. Experts say that going forward, the frequency and intensity of storms is only going to get worse due to climate change.
Last week, several environmental experts and community leaders and members — including Lamonte — joined Congresswoman Summer Lee, D-Swissvale, at a press conference calling out President Donald Trump for defunding climate and infrastructure programs. Trump has slashed the Federal Emergency Management Agency, nixed FEMA grants including $5.3 million slated for flood control in Bridgeville, and proposed cuts to organizations including the Environmental Protection Agency [EPA] and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
“Many local governments, particularly our smaller communities, lack the staff capacity and resources to adequately respond in extreme situations, and residents do not always have the resources to prepare for disasters, or long-term outages,” said Amanda Settelmaier, executive director of the Turtle Creek Valley Council of Governments, a coalition of 20 eastern suburbs. It takes all levels of government to address extreme weather, she said. “The consequence of not doing this is felt locally.”
Wilkinsburg: Funds nixed, project shelved
Wilkinsburg Borough Manager John Antinori said in an interview that a “small but vital” project aimed to mitigate stormwater damage at Westgate Condominium lost its funding in late March, just days before construction.
The project, led by University of Pittsburgh engineering students who designed rain gardens to soak up water in low-lying portions of the site, relied on a terminated $930,000 EPA grant that would have also funded nine other projects in Allegheny County.
Antinori said the condominium has had a longstanding issue with stormwater. A water main break sent flood water pouring downhill and into the complex in 2023, filling first-floor units four to five feet deep.
“[The project] would have really mitigated a problem that those property owners have,” Antinori said. “And they were one day away from having that construction begin.”
A county spokesperson said the project has been fully cancelled.
Forest Hills: Work backed up
After the April storm, Forest Hills Borough Manager Seth Abrams said the seven people in his Public Works Department spent most of May bringing “business back to normal.” This concentrated effort meant pushing aside their usual maintenance responsibilities.
“My public works crew is now three weeks behind in their work due to cleanup that we had to do after that storm,” he said during an interview in August.
Right now, according to Abrams, the department is in a crunch to update crosswalks, curbs and signs as the new school year brings increased pedestrian and bus traffic.
Abrams said he worries about what the future could hold, especially with limited help from the federal government.
“If things are going to get worse and we can barely hold it together now, what’s going to happen when there’s no additional resources?” he asked.
Penn Hills: Leaning on a local fee
Penn Hills Municipal Manager Scott Andrejchak has spent years working to improve the community’s infrastructure so it can face extreme weather. In 2019, back-to-back storms slammed the area in a single day, bringing floods that highlighted a need for a dedicated source of stormwater infrastructure funding. Yearly improvement efforts are now partially financed by a local stormwater fee that was introduced in 2021 and generates about $300,000 per year.
“We’ve accomplished a lot, even with our local money,” he said. “But we still depend on some of the bigger federal dollars for the infrastructure projects.”
In 2021, Penn Hills received $18 million from the American Rescue Plan, a COVID-19 stimulus package for recovery from the pandemic’s economic and health impacts. Some of that money was allocated toward both above-ground and underground infrastructure improvements. However, there is still more to be done, and federal funding is a key resource, according to Andrejchak.
“Any cuts at the federal level that impact infrastructure funding, it just means that the community has to pay more,” Andrejchak said. “We try to pursue grants where we can, and we have been very successful. … But the more extreme weather occurs, there’s just going to be more need, I suppose.”
Monroeville: Relying on neighbors
Monroeville Councilor Dennis Biondo said his family lost power for about a week after the April storm. In a widespread effort to manage the event, he said members of the Public Works Department were working 10-to-12-hour days. As in Forest Hills, this caused a backlog with day-to-day maintenance.
Jarryd Zola, who lost power when “a monstrosity of a tree” and a powerline fell in front of his Monroeville house, said he needed electricity for his sleep apnea machine. Like some of his neighbors, he couldn’t afford a generator. He wound up getting a ride from a relative and staying in a hotel until the power came back.
“It took time,” he said, while hard-pressed professional crews cleaned up. “Some of my neighbors were down there with little pee wee chainsaws trying to cut this thing up, but [they were] no match.”
A neighbor texted Zola and offered to share generator power with Zola’s father or anyone else in the family. “You ask about real life examples of people helping people and coming together, there you go,” Zola said.
Zola said, noting his experience, many Americans aren’t concerned enough about climate change.
“Every time there’s an election, climate change is down at the bottom for concerns,” he said. “And I just think it’s funny, because we all live on planet Earth.”
North Versailles: Waiting for wall repairs
Lamonte said she is frequently “fighting battles” to ensure environmental issues aren’t “out of sight, out of mind” for people.
Most recently, that has meant trying to get the East Allegheny School District to rebuild a retaining wall that crumbled during the June 6 flood. The spot where the wall was broken, Lamonte said, was where the water came over the banks in the subsequent flood on June 16. But she said so far, the school district has been too concerned about “fighting red tape” to take any action.
District officials did not respond to calls or emails from Public Source.
“I feel like we’ve become so jaded or numb to it that when you hear these stories, maybe you just don’t realize the true devastation that people are going through,” Lamonte said.
The time is now to invest in communities so they can adapt to extreme weather risks, Emily Zuetell, a Ph.D. student at Carnegie Mellon University researching public policy and civil and environmental engineering, said at the press conference. Zuetell said updating the region’s infrastructure is crucial, and doing so relies on federal funding.
On Monday, nearly 200 current and former FEMA employees published a letter cautioning that cuts to the agency could lead to a disaster comparable to Hurricane Katrina’s aftermath.
Zuetell said it is “reckless” for the federal government to cut resources from communities and from scientific research that could help develop solutions to extreme weather threats. “Failing to deliver these resources will lock in inadequate infrastructure that can’t withstand the next generation of extreme weather, leaving our communities vulnerable for decades to come,” she said.
Femi Horrall is an editorial intern at Pittsburgh’s Public Source. She can be reached at femi@publicsource.org.
This story was fact-checked by Rich Lord.
This article first appeared on Pittsburgh’s Public Source and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
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