By noon Tuesday in September 2020, Hurricane Sally was banging the side of my 1918 shotgun-style house in Pensacola’s Tanyard. The rains would follow, and I was worried. There was no evacuation notice.
The Tanyard floods regularly, and it’s worse since the new subdivisions went in. Now a 20-acre housing complex is going up across the street. If the rain was as bad as predicted, my house would be inundated.
A week before Sally, I met on Zoom with Dr. Steven Emerman, a hydrologist from The Environmentalist Exchange (TEX), and Harriet Festing, director of Higher Ground. They help Tanyard neighbors understand floodplain risks and fight bad development. Steve studies how poor stormwater planning causes urban flooding. Harriet leads the nation’s largest flood survivor organization.
What I call "the Big Build", the latest project turning our stable, mostly African-American working-class Tanyard into a gentrification frontier. The recipe: let flood infrastructure degrade, buy damaged homes cheap, flip them. The City of Pensacola made it easier by changing codes to allow 6-story buildings covering 95% of a lot.
The developer’s brochures don’t mention flooding. They show a blonde-haired mother on a bike following her daughter on the new "continuous waterfront trail system."
The Big Build will make it worse. When I showed the plans to a state floodplain manager, he gasped in horror.
That’s why I support Higher Ground’s "Flood Survivors’ Manifesto," written with survivors like me. Three points especially resonate:
- Don't Build Where it Floods
- Protect or restore natural ecologies that reduce flooding.
- Don't diss the knowledge and know-how of survivors
These are bold ideas and no-brainers. If Pensacola had followed even one, my neighbors and I wouldn’t face repetitive flooding and all the loss and grief it causes.
Hurricanes are bad, but they don’t have to be this bad.
Even with my house elevated 4 feet, Sally put 3 feet of water in my living room. It’s a wreck, and I don’t know if it should be rebuilt. That’s the Manifesto’s "Stop Recycling Flooded Properties." I’m staying with a friend outside Pensacola now. Higher Ground survivors have helped me, because to fight flooding you need comrades.
It’s us, in the Tanyard who bear the brunt of storms that hit Pensacola like clockwork. When the tide rises above the seawall and fills the drainage, raw sewage backs up outside my house, making the street disgusting and impassable.
That was six years ago. Today in 2026, the Big Build is still going up. The Tanyard still floods with every big rain, and the city still hasn’t fixed the drainage. Sally was not a one-time disaster. She was a warning. Until Pensacola follows the Flood Survivors’ Manifesto and stops building where it floods, none of us are safe.
Dr. Gloria Horning
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