- [Bill] Blake Grannum lives on a canal down by the Detroit River, the Jefferson Chalmers neighborhood on the Lower East side.

- And I've been over here my whole life.

Jefferson Chalmers has been a secret and it's now not a secret anymore.

It was just a little gem in the city where the canals run behind these houses and you have such a diverse neighborhood.

- [Bill] But every time it rains Grannum documents what goes on in the streets.

- This is an ongoing problem and it needs to be resolved because of all the water that we're getting.

- [Bill] Flood insurance in this low lying area, expensive.

The flooding, it wasn't always this way.

- No, we get basement backups and then we get streams in the.

- [Bill] So you're talking right.

- Right here in front of our house.

- [Bill] The fight is on to save Jefferson Chalmers.

,Jake Jergenson, one of its leaders.

- Is this neighborhood at risk?

- Very much so.

Yeah.

I would say that we are at a critical point in our neighborhood's trajectory and it's history.

If we don't fix the problems that are happening now our neighborhood will go the way of the dinosaur.

There's no question about it.

- Then the water receded.

- [Bill] And we first met John Myers back in 2019.

It was record high water on the Great Lakes, the Detroit River, causing the canals to overflow.

- The Army Corps and the city volunteers sandbagged this, which is good because I did breach the cap by an inch or so.

- [Bill] With the heavy rains, the attention now, what goes on down below.

- This was just rebuilt in October and it was collapsed from the construction.

They ran a truck over and then it just caved in.

And so they rebuilt it all cement and bricks and such and ever since then it hasn't drained.

There were some serious mistakes made about 100 years ago when they filled this piece of land in.

I mean this is all the Grand Marais or the Great Marsh.

Basically this was a village called Fairview Village.

It went from Waterworks Park to Cadou in Gross Point.

But there was six automobile manufacturers right in this neighborhood, Chalmers, Continental, Hudson, and they wanted a tax base.

So they said, "Look, we'll suck you into Detroit and you can go into our sewer system."

- An historic neighborhood with an historic combined sewer system where sewage water mixes with storm water.

Too much rain, you get combined sewer overflows.

- When you try to throw everything into pipes underground they fill up and once they get to a certain point the city goes down to the Fox Creek and they remove the log jams and they let it go right out the canal.

And that's to keep it out of the basements.

But 2014, 2016, 2019, and then 2021, I had a swimming pool in my basement along with a lot of other people.

- The trashed basements across Detroit, especially the east side.

- So I'll tell you, when the flood came everybody on that side of the street lost their car.

'Cause every time it rains here, we get flooding.

We get flooding in the streets and that's eroding things.

Things are swelling and going down and swelling and going down.

My house is moving right there.

Well it just looks like it's damp.

- Yeah.

- Probably all the time it looks damp huh?

- Yeah, yeah.

Along the canals, tiger dams intended to ward off high water, although lake levels have been receding of late.

- The orange thing.

Yeah.

- Now has that been there a while?

- It was put there after 2016.

That was the solution.

- That's not a permanent solution.

- No, no.

- Well, it's not going away any time soon, is it?

- I hope it goes away.

It's not doing anything now but junking up the place.

That, and all the sandbags that went down - Waterfront estates with boat docks, that's nice.

But the tiger dams, and it'd be better without sewage in the water.

It's only supposed to be utilized in emergency situations.

But of course, more than twice a year for the last dozen years we've had discharges into the canal.

- Greg Sawyer wants better notification when the sewage discharges happen.

- I mean, we've had people, we've caught people fishing in the water the day after the discharge and nobody's informed them that that is not the appropriate thing to do.

We have people that swim in the canal.

- We do know that raw sewage is being dumped into the canals.

So what we wanna do is test the toxicity.

- Grab the handle so you don't lose it all.

And we decided to tap our local teens who are an environmental science class at King High School and take it to the lab and see what the results are.

- Yo wanna be below that line, but above the second line.

- Has there been a lot of testing on the water here?

- I don't think so.

So this is something that we're doing grassroots on our own.

- And so we're gonna get a reference point of the bacteriological load as well as the chemical load so that when there is an event, we can have a team out here within 24 to 36 hours to take a sample and compare the two.

So we can say, this is what happens when we have a global climate event in the city.

- There's federal money to upgrade the region's infrastructure.

Jefferson Chalmers will need a lot of it.

- We gotta look at all the options.

We've gotta work with the federal government.

We've gotta understand how climate is changing and shifting and what that means when you live along any major body of water.

So we've got to understand everything and how are you now going to live in that area?

- One proposed fix, install locks separating the canals from the river.

- It would be a permanent situation until they got the crane back out there to pull it back out.

It would not.

- Why?

What would that do?

And what did you think about it?

- Well, it's not the answer.

Closing off waterways doesn't stop water.

- Blocking the canals rejected by the residents.

Some who want consideration for other bigger, bolder ideas.

- What we're talking about is a demonstration project.

A demonstration project takes a look at a variety of technologies and said, how can we deploy these different technologies?

- Not new technologies really, just not seen so much in these parts.

Take a look at this.

This plastic device is driven into the soil and it allows for infiltration to happen more quickly.

- More than that, Jergensen's suggesting underground storm water holding tanks installed under vacant fields and city streets.

A lot of digging.

Better the water there than in people's basements.

- I don't know if that can be successful but those are the type of things that need to come together so we can have all the facts and say what is going to be successful and the reason why.

And also what's the cost associated with that?

That was a pretty ambitious plan from what I saw.

- And who's offering up all the property where these tanks might go, even if there are the many, many millions of dollars it take to do it.

- And if the water's a problem, maybe you ought to move.

(laughs) - Well that's one option.

You have to think about affordability.

Not everybody has that option unfortunately.

So what you can do is just work together as citizens and organize ourselves, educate ourselves and figure out some solutions.

- Why do you stay here with all this water?

- I was born and raised in Detroit.

I'm a lifelong Detroiter.

All my children live here.

Who doesn't like living off the water?

- Given what climate change is and water levels rising, changes, we're all gonna have to adapt.

Not to say that they can't have what they have, it's just going to have to change.

It's probably a more accurate and we don't know what that change is unless we work together.

- We already know what the problem is.

We don't need to investigate a million other things.

We know what the issue is.

We just need to now find a solution of how to fix our infrastructure.

And I know that costs a lot of money, but I mean our neighborhood and the people in this community, we're worth it.

We're worth you guys spending the money.

- We've gotta solve these problems or the residents in our neighborhood and not just our neighborhood.

Dearborn, the Detroit Aviation Sub, Morningside, the areas that are plagued with these chronic infrastructure problems will continue to see their property values go down 'cause they won't have the resources to invest in their homes to improve their value and have them appreciate over time.

So we have to solve these.

We don't have a choice.

Well, like I said, our neighborhood will go the way of the dinosaurs.

- And for more on the impact of global climate change make sure to watch Nova's "Weathering the Future"