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Storms Bring Floods and Power Failures to Weary N.Y. and N.J. Residents If a Rainstorm Causes Flooding in New York, What Would a Hurricane Bring?
(about 5 hours later)
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In the last 10 days, New York City has seen a blackout in Manhattan, power failures in Brooklyn and Queens, and an oppressive three-day heat wave. A car rocked like flotsam in thigh-deep water in Brooklyn. A cascade ran down subway stairs in Harlem while a nonchalant commuter checked her phone. The rain knocked out power for some 200,000 New Jersey customers, a day after a heat wave caused tens of thousands to suffer blackouts in New York City.
Then, on Monday night, a thunderstorm brought weary New Yorkers fierce winds and heavy rains that wreaked havoc, causing flash floods across the city and suburbs. The chaos came not from a “superstorm,” but an intense, short thundershower.
The region moved quickly from sweat-soaked to waterlogged, with areas still flooded on Tuesday morning, especially in New Jersey, where fire departments and emergency agencies cautioned drivers to avoid inundated areas. A day later, on Tuesday, officials and residents across the region sounded an alarm: If summer weather swings create this level of havoc, they said, the New York area is not ready for the sharper extremes that climate change will bring — let alone the next hurricane.
In Hackensack, N.J., the city’s Fire Department said it had rescued multiple people early Tuesday whose cars were stuck in the water. “Every data point suggests that climate change is moving a lot quicker than city government,” Scott M. Stringer, the city’s comptroller, said in an interview. “We did not have a superstorm last night. We had rainfall, and people were literally swimming on Carroll Street,” he added, referring to flooding in Brooklyn. “If that is not a clarion call for focus, then I don’t know what is.”
The winds, and in some cases, hail, left more than 300,000 customers without power in New Jersey, officials said. Some New Yorkers on Monday took matters into their own hands. On the flooded Long Island Expressway, Daphnee Youree, 50, waded out of her car in Crocs and pulled debris from a clogged grate with a traffic cone, draining the pool.
New Jersey’s governor, Philip D. Murphy, warned that it could take multiple days for electricity to be fully restored. As of 12:45 p.m. on Tuesday, more than 180,000 customers still did not have electricity, according to two utility companies in the state. After Hurricane Sandy, which devastated swaths of New York City and coastal New Jersey in 2012, the federal government allocated $14.7 billion to help the city rebuild and make its infrastructure more resilient — measures that included building sea barriers, hardening subway stations and flood-proofing boilers and wiring in homes. But only 54 percent of the allocated money has been spent, Mr. Stringer’s office reported last May.
In New York City, more than two inches of rain had fallen in Central Park by 8 a.m. on Tuesday, the National Weather Service said. More than three inches of precipitation were measured in parts of Queens, Staten Island, Long Island and New Jersey. Climate scientists warn that as Earth heats, the region can expect more frequent heavy rainstorms, 100-degree temperatures, high-tide flooding and intense storms, which could inundate Lower Manhattan, wipe out coastal neighborhoods and overwhelm infrastructure.
The wind was intense, with some gusts whipping through parts of New Jersey at 70 miles per hour, the Weather Service said. Those threats have spawned resiliency plans and proposals priced at billions of dollars that are far from being implemented; while they are hashed out, stopgap measures, like walls of sandbags and concrete, are being used to protect areas such as Wall Street and Red Hook.
Scattered showers and isolated thunderstorms continued to move across the New York City area on Tuesday morning, and the Weather Service issued a flash flood watch for most of the region that lasted until noon. Climate change drove the passage last month of an ambitious New York State law that requires nothing short of reshaping the economy to eliminate carbon emissions.
On Monday evening, floodwaters blocked parts of the Long Island Expressway and Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, officials said. The next morning, around rush hour, more flooding snagged traffic on the Belt Parkway in Queens. But even as urgent action is needed to address those grandiose challenges for the coming decades, the double whammy of climate change and aging infrastructure is hitting now. Just 10 days ago, a burning 13,000-volt cable touched off another power failure, on Manhattan’s West Side.
The downpours also turned city streets into rushing streams in parts of the city, particularly in Brooklyn and Staten Island. And floods that are smaller but far more frequent than the catastrophic ones brought on by Sandy are already overwhelming sewers, sluicing pollution into waterways and damaging neighborhoods, said Costa Constantinides, the chairman of the City Council’s Committee on Environmental Protection.
As they stood huddled under umbrellas, awnings and sidewalk scaffolding, New Yorkers were dismayed by the meteorological shift after three sun-soaked, 90-degree-plus days. “It shows that we have a long way to go as a city,” he said of Monday’s floods and the weekend blackouts that resulted from heavy air-conditioner use, which he said would only get worse as temperatures rise.
Undeterred, some wrapped plastic bags around their shoes to protect their feet before fording newly formed rivers. Others simply shrugged and waded into knee-deep water. “We’re going to see not just the big floods, not just storm surge, but flooding a little bit more in communities every time there’s rain,” he said. “We need to come up with a five-borough resiliency plan — it’s not just Lower Manhattan, but every corner of New York City.”
Then there was Daphnee Youree, 50, who, confronted with severe flooding on the Long Island Expressway, took matters into her own hands. The Council last year required that the city map vulnerable areas and make plans to address flooding there. Experts have asked Congress to do the same for the whole country.
She was driving home to Brooklyn, along with her 11-year-old son and her cat, when traffic came to a halt. There was a giant pool of standing water caused by clogged sewer grates. Innovative measures are being called for, like building green roofs and porous surfaces; taxing properties that generate excess runoff; or issuing special bonds to finance green infrastructure. But at the same time, officials say, old-school infrastructure maintenance and sewer improvements can make a difference immediately.
“It was crazy,” she said in an interview on Tuesday. “I’d never seen anything like that on the L.I.E.” In Mr. Constantinides’s district, in Astoria, Shore Boulevard had flooded knee-deep in recent storms because its drainage outlet, which led directly into the adjacent East River, was blocked by sand and stones. After a recent cleaning, the area had only minor flooding on Monday.
Ms. Youree and a group of others pulled over, waiting to see if the water would clear. Someone half-jokingly suggested someone should try clearing the debris. But in other areas, officials struggle to pinpoint fixes. The lack of quick answers on the cause of flooding on Monday on Beard Street in low-lying Red Hook “bodes poorly for our preparedness,” said the local City Council member, Carlos Menchaca.
“Everybody was just standing around,” she said. “So, I decided to just do it.” More than two inches of rain had fallen in Central Park by 8 a.m. on Tuesday, the National Weather Service said. More than three inches of precipitation were measured in parts of Queens, Staten Island, Long Island and New Jersey.
She grabbed a nearby orange traffic cone and trudged through the floodwaters in her Crocs. Winds, and in some cases, hail, left more than 300,000 customers without power in New Jersey. More than 88,000 were still without service on Tuesday afternoon.
As she worked to clear the mud and wood, ultimately clearing three grates, she said, people cheered her on. A video of her digging away the muck was posted on Twitter, where she was applauded by the City Council speaker, Corey Johnson, as a “Great New Yorker.” In New York, as heat turned to downpour on Monday evening, some commuters wrapped plastic bags around their shoes to protect their feet before fording newly formed rivers. Others simply shrugged and waded into water.
“It was crazy,” said Ms. Youree, the driver who was brought to a standstill on the Long Island Expressway. “I’d never seen anything like that on the L.I.E.”
Drivers waited to see if the water would clear.
“Everybody was just standing around,” she said in an interview on Tuesday. “So, I decided to just do it.”
She left her 11-year-old son and her cat in the car.
As she worked to clear the mud and wood, ultimately removing three grates, she said people cheered her on. A video of her digging away the muck was posted on Twitter, where she was applauded by the Council speaker, Corey Johnson, as a “Great New Yorker.”
Ms. Youree laughed off the praise: “I just wanted to get home,” she said.Ms. Youree laughed off the praise: “I just wanted to get home,” she said.
New Jersey was so rattled by the power failures that utilities had to request outside help, with one, PSE&G, soliciting aid from power companies in Canada. Michael Gold contributed reporting.
“Folks obviously want to get back into business, and who can blame them? But this was an incredibly intense storm,” Mr. Murphy said during a radio interview on 1010 WINS. “Lots of trees are down, which is a big source of the outages and a lot of folks still without power.”
The hardest-hit areas were Ocean, Monmouth and Burlington counties in the central part of the state, he said.
In New York City, after Con Edison crews spent Monday working to restore power to the tens of thousands who lost it during the heat wave, more than 6,000 customers were without electricity after the storms, including in the parts of Brooklyn affected by Sunday night’s power failure. Roughly half of them had their power restored by noon, and Con Edison said it expected most of its customers to have power by Tuesday evening.
Subway stations, never impermeable to the elements, were inundated, with some seeming to sprout waterfalls more reminiscent of amusement parks than mass transit.
Nick Corasaniti contributed reporting.