As a restaurant owner in New Orleans, Shaka Gerel is no stranger to hurricanes.
Afrodisiac, the Jamaican Creole fusion food truck he started with his wife Caron, served jerk chicken and crawfish etouffee, rain or shine, for years. When particularly bad storms took out the city’s power, the couple sometimes used their bright purple truck’s generator to offer their neighbors a place to charge their phones or refill on ice.
“We would just do whatever we could to help,” Gerel said.
That approach continued to guide them through the pandemic, when Afrodisiac partnered with the city to provide meals for the homeless. But the food truck faced its own crisis late in 2020, when a tree knocked over by Hurricane Zeta crashed on to the top, crumpling the truck like a soda can. When the Gerels eventually secured a loan that allowed them to buy a brick-and-mortar space to serve as Afrodisiac’s new permanent home, they took the neighborly ethos of the food truck with them.
So when a customer named Devin De Wulf walked into the restaurant one day and asked if they would be interested in having solar panels installed on the roof so that the new Afrodisiac could serve as a community resilience hub in the face of the next hurricane, the suggestion immediately resonated. The idea was to do essentially what the Gerels had already done in the face of past hurricanes – support their neighbors by providing a place to charge their phones, cool off, get some ice or buy a hot meal – but with the help of rooftop solar and a battery to store extra power.
“The restaurant is already a place that’s kind of common ground in the neighborhood. It’s already a community hub,” Gerel said. By equipping a restaurant like theirs with solar power and a battery, “you’re allowing the restaurant to continue being a support for the community when hurricanes hit”, he said.
The initiative, called Get Lit Stay Lit, is the latest project of Feed the Second Line, De Wulf’s pandemic mutual-aid-project-turned-nonprofit. De Wulf, a middle school social studies teacher, started the organization to create a stronger safety net for the “culture bearers” – often working-class New Orleanians – whose parades, masking and music make the city so vibrant.
With the Gerels’ enthusiasm and Feed the Second Line’s funding, solar panels were installed on the roof of Afrodisiac in October 2022, marking one of the project’s first attempts to prove that restaurants could serve as climate resilience centers in the face of future storms.
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Hurricanes have long been a part of life in the Gulf coast, but the climate crisis fueled by humans burning oil and gas are making storms more intense. Perhaps no American city has more famously been affected than New Orleans, which was devastated by Hurricane Katrina, the most expensive and one of the deadliest natural disasters in US history, in 2005, and has continued to be battered by storms in the nearly two decades since.
Income inequality and structural racism play a role in determining who in the city is most likely to bear the brunt of a disaster’s impact, meaning that Black New Orleanians – who have created so much of the culture that has made their city famous – are often particularly hard-hit.
De Wulf got the idea for the restaurant solar project in the wake of Hurricane Ida in 2021. Rather than evacuate, he and his family hunkered down in their home, which is equipped with solar panels, so that his wife could finish out her shift at the ER where she works as a doctor.
When his neighborhood lost power for the next 10 days, De Wulf saw “minute by minute, hour by hour, the impact that a microgrid could have on a neighborhood”. De Wulf’s solar panel allowed their neighbors to charge their phones so they could get in touch with family or access local news; turned their home into a drop-off point for supplies; powered a neighbor’s oxygen machine; and kept an elderly couple’s refrigerator running so their food wouldn’t spoil.
“My house probably helped about 200 people after Hurricane Ida,” he said. “So a restaurant could definitely help the half-mile radius around that place. The people who can walk to that restaurant could be served.”
Thus the idea for Get Lit Stay Lit was born. The initiative’s goal is to create a more climate-resilient New Orleans by embedding restaurant microgrids in neighborhoods across the city, which are crucial as hurricanes and flooding can often make it difficult for residents to get out or aid to get in when need is highest immediately after a storm. They have started out by looking for restaurants in neighborhoods that are underresourced, and that may already have a relationship with a minority or immigrant community. Every solar panel they install comes at no cost to the restaurant.
The first restaurant to get a Stay Lit solar array was Queen Trini Lisa, an award-winning Trinbagonian soul food joint. The restaurant got its start with the founder, Lisa Nelson, cooking meals for her kids in the corner store her family owned that were so delicious-smelling that customers started asking if they could buy her leftovers.
De Wulf describes her as the kind of person that would help anyone she could, any chance she got, which is important because the entire project is based on trust: Feed the Second Line gives the solar panels to participating restaurants at no cost, and once a storm hits, there’s no way to monitor that someone in another neighborhood is making good on their promise to use their solar to take care of their neighbors.
From Nelson’s perspective, opting into the program was a win-win – not only will she not lose her cold storage and be able to help her community when the next storm hits, but having solar on the restaurant is saving her money in the meantime. “It does help me with my energy bill, because, especially now in the summer, there’s a lot of sun during the day. I’m pretty much off the grid,” she said.
There hasn’t been a major hurricane since Afrodisiac and Queen Trini Lisa got their panels and batteries. But when the city has experienced power outages – a not infrequent occurrence, even without a megastorm – Nelson has sometimes not even realized it, because the solar panels mean she’s able to keep working in the restaurant without missing a beat.
“I’m powered by the sun,” she said.
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So far, Feed the Second Line has installed solar on five restaurants around New Orleans, with four more installations scheduled for the coming months. And the Get Lit Stay Lit program recently received the promise of nearly $3.7m in congressional appropriations from the state, which De Wulf thinks could fund installations at another 20 to 30 restaurants.
The real proof of concept will come once the next major hurricane hits, but De Wulf is hopeful both about the impact the program could have on his home city as well as the potential for the model to be replicated elsewhere.
As for Gerel, he’s just happy to be even better equipped to do what he’s always done: take care of his community.
“Being neighbors and being in New Orleans, we support each other during those hurricane times,” he said. “We band together.”
