WATERLOGGED: Though she lives more than a mile from either river, last week's flooding left Ruth Birchett's basement practically submerged. : Manuel Dominguez Jr

Residents near the Schuylkill and Delaware rivers were forced to move to higher ground last week when the rivers escaped their banks, but the pounding rain also didn't help matters at Birchett's place on the 1900 block of West Norris Street, more than a mile from the rising waters. In central North Philly, excess storm water flowing off vacant lots has seeped through basement floors and walls for more than 20 years.

The mold, cracks in her walls and shifting floors have taken such a toll on the house where Birchett's father raised nine kids that she's considering moving, a tough decision for a 53-year-old woman who started a community organization out of her living room and put a tape recorder in her window to document New Year's Eve shoot-outs. She's all for partnering with people to better the community, which is why she was optimistic in the late '70s when a young, passionate activist moved in a block and a half away from her on Diamond Street.

His name was John Street. He would go on to join City Council in 1979 and become council president and, of course, mayor. But before any of that, he was the 32nd Ward, 11th Division committeeperson, the seat now held by Birchett. She recalls Street held meetings in church basements where he'd proclaim, "We need to make the city fix up these houses!"

It's an unwritten rule that once elected, pols take care of the place where they came up. And, for the most part, Street kept his promises to residents of the 5th District, which includes some of the city's most moneyed addresses (Rittenhouse Square) and most blighted (North Philly, west of Broad). Yet, problems have continued to fester on Birchett's block.

"Our neighborhood does not look like we know the mayor," she says. "He just stepped on our backs and kept going."

It's hard for Birchett to fit visitors into her schedule. It's not that she doesn't want to tell her story. (In fact, once you get her going, it's hard to get her to stop talking.) She's just busy checking on elderly neighbors. It's how she was brought up.

As children, if she and her siblings scrubbed the front steps of the three-story row home where she still lives, they couldn't dump the bucket of soapy water until they offered to scrub neighbors' steps, too.

"It's those kind of values that sustained us," she says, sitting among an exercise bike, board games and folding chairs rescued from the flooded basement. "I was an adult before I realized I was poor."

When white flight decimated the neighborhood in the '60s, black residents bought homes in poor condition that are now crumbling. Through the 1980s, buildings deteriorated further. One day, Birchette watched the bar directly across the street plummet toward her. A few minutes later a stunned elderly woman outside gripped the porch railing; she wore glasses so covered in dust Birchett couldn't see her eyes.

"It was the scariest thing you could ever imagine," she says.

That same year, her nephew chased a ball inside an abandoned house also across the street and fell through the floor into water 4 feet deep. He couldn't swim, but a ray of light illuminated a set of stairs leading him to safety.

Now, the side of Birchett's street where the bar and abandoned houses once stood is completely leveled. When rains falls on the grassy field that remains, water seeps into the ground and finds its way to basements on Birchett's side of West Norris, where she counts just 11 occupied homes. Lendy Williams, 55, has lived in one of them for 37 years and, until about a year ago, when the Philadelphia Housing Authority reinforced her walls, water would fill her basement whenever it rained. "It looked like somebody turned the faucet on," she says. The walls are stronger, but water still comes in through the front of the basement floor. It's the same for Curtis Johnson, who's lived next door to Birchett for 43 years. He's not sure where the water comes from, but he says it got worse as the houses disappeared.

There were once 50 homes on this block, between Cecil B. Moore and Diamond. Birchett believes that possible faulty underground water pipes plus large cracks in the street are to blame. "It just shows the dangerous situation this tearing down of homes has created," she says, adding that the city Department of Licenses and Inspections has demolished a few unstable homes a year for as long as she can remember.

In addition to running a homeless shelter and working for the mayor's Office of Community Services under Ed Rendell, Birchett has volunteered for various Democratic campaigns since the mid-'70s, though she recently became disillusioned with the party machine and registered as an Independent.

She has written letters to Street and his successor in council, Darrell Clarke, and she says she's had in-person conversations with Clarke and a Street staffer, both to no avail. (Neither Street's nor Clarke's offices returned calls.)

"Their footprints are on our back," she says, looking with disgust at Rendell's face on the television news. "Irrespective of loyalty, what about responding to neighborhood need? We have a problem we cannot solve ourselves."

Instead of rehabilitating existing homes as Birchett says Street promised to do, the city cleared areas to make way for development. Although Neighborhood Transformation Initiative Director Eva Gladstein says NTI has not done any demos on Birchett's block, the program is expected to raze 1,000 unsafe homes in the 5th District alone by 2007.

Birchett, who voted for Street when he first ran for mayor, would prefer the city put money toward restoration of "blighted" homes rather than what she calls shortsighted demolition. In the meantime, she's trying to move, but both times she applied to buy homes—at 20th and Oxford and at 51st and Parkside—she was passed over in favor of people displaced for new development.

Turning back to the mess in her home, Birchett decides the rubber galoshes leaning on the wall are too short and negotiates the narrow steps down into the basement in sandals. Birchett, who has no homeowners' insurance, ticks off the items floating by: dining room chairs, a barbeque smoker, tools, lumber for shelves, kitchen cabinets …

Then she dunks a yardstick into the murky water and shakes her head. "Fifteen inches," she says.

Soon, her son would come by to pump out the water, but that was only a temporary fix. More rain was expected that afternoon.