Hillary Sell sat in the NICU with her newborn daughter. The power was out.

Generators whirred, keeping the machine that four-day-old Alice was hooked up to running. Red emergency lighting illuminated the ward. Rain lashed the building outside.

It was late on Sept. 1, 2021, and a few miles away, Hillary’s husband, Chris Mackay, was at their house on the edge of the Schuylkill, trying to save everything he could from the coming flood.

Hours later, Chris, his mother-in-law, and Hillary’s 8-year-old daughter Lili would join their neighbors in being rescued by boat. Hillary remained in the hospital, recovering from the emergency appendectomy that had forced the early delivery of Alice.

“We haven’t lived a single ‘normal’ day since,” said Hillary.

But 362 days later, on Sunday — the day before she turned 1 — baby Alice woke up in the family’s home, in her own crib, for the first time.

It was the same home the family had left behind.

But now, it was eight feet higher in the air.

Chris and Hillary responded to Hurricane Ida’s ravaging of the Philadelphia region with a drastic decision: to lift their Montgomery County home higher than floodwaters can likely rise, elevating the threshold of the first level to three-and-a-half feet above Ida’s record-making highwater mark.

The peace of mind comes at a cost of about $300,000 — 80% of it covered by disaster relief and insurance money, plus a government loan on top of that. The process has turned their lives upside-down, but last weekend, the finish line came into sight.

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“It was worth giving up a year,” Chris said on Sunday, the family’s first morning back in the house, “to ensure that we get decades here.”

The struggles of the Mackay-Sell family and their neighbors are representative of those of Ida survivors across the region, some of whom are still displaced a year later. Across Downingtown and Coatesville, Bridgeport and Upper Dublin, Manayunk and Mullica Hill, N.J., the storm’s consequences still reverberate.

In low-lying Mont Clare, Chris and Hillary’s backyard on Walnut Street stretches down to the Schuylkill Canal, which runs parallel to the river before meeting it. Across the river from Phoenixville, the village sits on the left bank of the Schuylkill along with the village of Port Providence, part of Upper Providence Township.

When the remnants of Hurricane Ida came through, the river rose so high the township’s flood gauges couldn’t measure it. Nearly 200 homes were damaged in Upper Providence.

The people here faced a dizzying choice that a growing number of Americans will contend with as climate change supercharges storms and fuels intense rainfall, flooding, and fires: Whether to stay or go.

This summer alone has seen hundreds of Americans join their ranks, from Kentucky and Texas to Missouri and Illinois. The more people affected by severe weather, the more clean-up towns will face and the more strain on a government system not equipped to repair the damage.

» READ MORE: ‘Don’t let us die down here’: A year later, a look at Hurricane Ida’s devastation of the Philly area

Some of Chris and Hillary’s neighbors repaired their homes and moved back in. Some sold and left. Others gave their homes up to a federal buyout program, meaning the properties will be demolished, something about 285 people statewide have signed up for.

The Mackay-Sell family is among about 20 Ida-damaged homeowners in Pennsylvania who are raising their houses. Hillary and Chris couldn’t imagine leaving their friendly, affordable neighborhood, with its freedom for kids to play and the river, trail, and downtown Phoenixville all steps away. They’d bought the adjacent twin for Chris’ mother to eventually move into, so they owned both sides of the property.

And they thought another major flood was probably inevitable.

“The way to stay there,” said Chris, “was to do this.”

On May 11, the 120-year-old brick twin was raised one foot at a time, contractors stacking blocks underneath and Hillary praying it wouldn’t collapse.

People came from up and down the street to watch.

The entire process took about 10 hours over two days. For the next few months, the twin looked nonsensical, the front doors floating in midair. It became something of a point of interest, with bikers and drivers frequently slowing down as they passed.

“When I first saw it up in the air, like fully up in the air with nothing [permanent] underneath it, I think I had a panic attack,” said Hillary, 37, who bought the house in 2018. “Because there’s no going back at that point. It just looked so crazy. And high.”

Concrete blocks were built up under the house, and the temporary beams were replaced with permanent steel beams. The walls were filled in, inspectors came, and, finally, the empty space where their first floor had once rested became twin garages. With, of course, flood vents.

As contractors methodically worked on the foundation, exterior, and first floor, the family of four stayed with Hillary’s dad in the Lehigh Valley, which meant an hour’s commute each way to Lili’s school.

Chris kept reminding himself that there would be an end date. Hillary clung to Aug. 29, Alice’s first birthday: We have to be back in by then, she repeatedly told the contractors.

The longest part of the process, though, was actually deciding to do it.

The night of Ida, the water had quickly risen through basements — Chris found their 17-year-old cat Diggle drifting on a pile of inner tubes in theirs — and into first floors. It came up about four feet high in the Mackay-Sells’ dining room and kitchen. Later, township officials would estimate the Schuylkill rose a record-breaking 27 feet above flood stage.

“I opened the front door, and the house was basically in the river,” recalled Chris, 38.

The water left behind muck, destruction, and the threat of mold. When the couple returned two days after the storm, they were reeling from the double shock of a newborn and a flood. Hillary wasn’t even supposed to be walking around post-surgery. The cleanup job hit them “like a ton of bricks,” she recalled.

They attended a township meeting about the buyout program, in which the government buys flood-damaged homes for market value and razes them for permanent open space. Hillary and Chris considered that, but then heard they might be able to get funding for lifting.

The more they thought about it, the smarter it seemed – though it also felt a little radical, an enormous “leap of faith,” Chris said. The couple had to spend $20,000 on an architect before they could even have the zoning variance reviewed by the township.

The variance, allowing the building’s height, was finally done in March. Hillary recalls crying when they got the green light. Work started in April.

“We expected it to be kind of contentious or people just not liking it. Because it’s a big deal. It’s kind of obnoxious in some ways,” she said. “But nobody objected.”

The step puts them in a relatively small but growing number of homeowners nationwide — including on the Jersey Shore — who are lifting their homes as climate change advances, hoping to preserve their ways of life without giving up their homes in flood zones.

“I just think when we look back in 10 years, 15 years, [Ida] isn’t going to be historic,” Hillary said. “So much of the calculus with what we’re doing is that this isn’t going to stop and this is going to keep happening.”

The Upper Providence residents living along the canal have long known the idyllic waterfront location came with a potential price during the rainy season, but past flooding had almost always been manageable.

Now, there’s a sense that climate change is close by.

Since Ida, local officials have changed the way they think about the river. They got new flood gauges that will measure higher water. A color-coded warning system will trigger evacuations. Residents can raise their houses without a zoning variance, said Bill Starling, chair of the Upper Providence Township board of supervisors.

“It’s not safe anymore. These intense rain events are going to continue to occur,” Starling said. “It is still a danger living down there along the riverbank.”

At Robin and Rachel Poggi’s home, a few doors down from Hillary and Chris, there’s now a little anxiety in the air when a storm is coming. They repaired their home because they couldn’t imagine leaving it.

“You feel like that’s the kind of thing that happens to other people, not us. I don’t feel that way anymore,” said Rachel Poggi, 70, sitting with her husband in their refurbished kitchen on an August afternoon. “And there is anxiety — did we make a big mistake staying? But, where would we have gone?”

Next door, though, their daughter and her husband applied for the buyout and moved away because the damage to their house was so great.

On nearby Hollow Road in Port Providence, Dorothy Moyer decided to take the buyout. Her house, which she bought in 1978, was fully outfitted to be wheelchair-accessible, allowing Moyer to live independently with multiple sclerosis. All the equipment was destroyed in the flood, said her daughter, Aimee Bailey.

The family couldn’t afford to rebuild, but the buyout will allow Bailey, 42, to add an accessible wing onto her Collegeville home for her mother. Residents across the region are still waiting on FEMA approval before the buyout deals are closed.

“It’s sad to see a lot of the people who have been there for decades being pushed out,” Bailey said. “It really does feel like the floodwater is pushing people out.”

Less than two weeks before they would move back in, with the first level still under construction, the Mackay-Sell family ascended the still-wobbly skeleton of a staircase — one of two new sets of stairs leading to the elevated entrances – to begin cleaning.

They paused in the dining room, the same place Hillary and Chris were married in August 2020. On one wall, what was once the front door had been turned into a long window.

“It’s very weird,” Chris said. “The light’s different; what you’re looking at out the window is different.”

As a township inspector finished a walk-through, Chris and Hillary headed upstairs to Lili’s room to start cleaning.

The second and third floors held a time capsule from their pre-flood life: Hillary’s desk calendar was stuck on Aug. 27, 2021, the day she went to the hospital; clothes were piled in Lili’s room that would now be too small for her; an empty drinking glass and a fork still sat on Chris’s desk.

They started cleaning.

Ten days later, on Saturday, the house was ready enough. The floors were laid, the electricity was working, and the plumbing was on. The Mackay-Sell family arrived with boxes, bags, and helpers to move in. Making trips up and down the new staircases, they joked that it was “leg day.”

Hillary’s father, Eric, hadn’t been to the house yet. He was stunned. After a year of living in “crisis mode,” focusing on putting one foot in front of the other, the magnitude of the project hit Hillary as she saw it through her father’s eyes.

“There’s been a couple times where we’ve seen on other people’s faces, they’ve registered how big it is,” she said, wiping away tears. “I don’t really think about it…, but then when I see other people digest that, for whatever reasons, I see it.”

On Sunday morning, their first in the house, they ate breakfast in the dining room at a folding table, surrounded by moving debris. Alice crawled near Daisy the dog, who was blissfully laying in her old spot near the window. Lili, 8, turned cartwheels on the newly laid floor.

“It feels pretty alive,” Lili said, looking around the house.

There was still a lot to do: The kitchen was missing countertops and appliances; the first floor needed baseboards and trim. Construction dust and debris waited to be cleaned up. That afternoon, Chris and Hillary had to unpack bags, break down boxes, and round up trash.

Still, they’d made it, more than twenty-four hours before Alice turned one.

“I feel kind of like someone has just lifted a weight of relief off of my chest. Because I thought we might not ever be able to come back,” Lili said, climbing up to the bunk bed in her new bedroom. “Now I feel very good because we can just be here, not worrying about anything.”

On Monday, Lili walked to the bus stop for the first day of third grade– no more commute. That evening, Alice got her first birthday candle, in a chocolate-peanut butter pie, in her high-chair in the dining room.

“We didn’t do this whole year for nothing,” Chris said. “This is 100% worth it. Absolutely 100% worth it.”