NEW ORLEANS — As Hurricane Helene approaches the U.S. Gulf Coast, coming on the heels of another major storm two weeks ago, blackouts are all but certain in some areas. That carries extra risk for some people.
Each time the lights go out in New Orleans, Verna Lee and her husband Ronald Bailey, both 71, worry how long the batteries will last on the breathing machine Bailey relies on to keep his airways open at night. There is always that stressful decision to stay or to leave, with all the upheaval that evacuation entails.
“Ron’s always a little more willing to stay, but it’s like, he can’t,” Lee said. Two weeks ago, when the lights went out during Hurricane Francine, “He was thinking he would just try to sleep sitting up,” she said. “When he lays down, he has to have that machine on to sleep, because his breathing stops otherwise.”
Francine’s wind and rain lashed the dark neighborhoods, flooding them as Lee and Bailey almost decided to evacuate and stay with relatives in Texas.
Then they remembered that their neighborhood church still had its lights on. Inside First Grace United Methodist Church, they found an air-conditioned refuge, a place to plug in their devices. They were able to charge the breathing machine and go back to sleep in their own home.
First Grace is part of the Community Lighthouse Project, an initiative born of hurricanes, to provide essentials like functioning electrical outlets and air conditioning to people facing blackouts, by building out solar panels on church roofs. The nonprofit Together New Orleans founded the project to turn the buildings into microgrids, meaning they generate and store their own electricity when the grid is down. There are now nine operating in New Orleans, with a plan to expand to 86 across the city and 500 across the state.
The buildings keep operating through blackouts because they’ve installed batteries that charge up from the sun. Such self-sustaining microgrids have great potential for many places in the world that are slammed by increasingly intense hurricanes and typhoons.
One of the Community Lighthouse Project’s founding members, Broderick Bagert, was motivated by his own searing experience.
His baby Isaiah was born with jaundice Aug. 21, 2012, just a few days before Hurricane Isaac hit. Doctors said the baby needed to be admitted to the hospital, but the storm was brewing in the Gulf. So they sent Bagert home with a light bed — a tiny container that exposes babies to blue light.
Then the power went out.
“I remember scurrying through the neighborhood, with a light bed under one arm and an 8-day-old child on the other,” Bagert said. He knew his sister had a generator, and he made it to her house.
Isaiah made it through his jaundice.
But Bagert was left with frustration and outrage that communities like his on the front lines of climate change have no safe spaces to go during a storm. Hurricane Ida came in 2021, 10 years after Isaac. Isaac had come seven years after Katrina.
“It was like it just sunk in: … They’re never going to do it,” he said about government officials building enough emergency shelters.
In the network of Community Lighthouses, First Grace has symbolic significance.
It was formed after Hurricane Katrina wrecked two churches in 2005 — one historically white and one historically Black. They merged because members felt they could do more for the community together. These days, the congregation includes immaculately dressed elders and tattooed hipsters in shorts, all rising to sway to the gospel choir on Sundays.
There are reminders of what came before: Images of the old Black church’s stained-glass windows are painted on the inner halls of First Grace, and across the street lies the stump of an old Confederate monument that the congregation advocated to remove.
The Rev. Shawn Moses Anglim, who also helped found the network, remembers his heart sinking when he saw how the roof of First Grace’s sanctuary had been ripped off by Hurricane Ida. It made him passionate about providing a safe shelter during and after storms.
“We’ve got to rethink this,” he remembers deciding.
