Floods engulf Queens
/
Flood water inundated Queens and the entire city on Friday, causing massive disruptions and damage across the five boroughs. Eagle photo by Ryan Schwach
By Ryan Schwach
Torrential rainfall and heavy flooding walloped the Big Apple for hours on Friday, causing a number of issues for Queens residents and others in the five boroughs.
In what is becoming a more and more familiar sight for New Yorkers, flood waters invaded everything from city streets, to low lying coastal areas, to subways stations, to the city’s airports.
While Queens was spared from bearing the brunt of the storm – in contrast to the effects of Hurricane Ida in 2021 – the remnants of Tropical Storm Ophelia still flooded streets in the borough, from Northeastern Queens to the tip of the Rockaway peninsula. Countless basement apartments in the borough were flooded and the commutes of Queens residents, including thousands of students, were severely disrupted.
It was the wettest day in New York City since Hurricane Ida struck in September of 2021 – a storm that killed nearly a dozen people, most of them Queens residents who lived in basement apartments.
In Brooklyn flood waters overwhelmed residential streets, engulfing cars and rushing through at least one MTA bus on Friday. In other parts of the city, including Long Island City, Canal Street and Grand Army Plaza, water flooded subway stations – at one point in the afternoon, every single city subway route was either totally or partially suspended, or facing heavy delays.
Manhattan’s Central Park became home to some new lakes, and at least one sea lion at the park’s zoo explored some new areas after water engulfed their enclosure.
Queens, of course, did not avoid the deluge.
The Grand Central Parkway looked more like a river near LaGuardia Airport and Citi Field, stopping traffic entirely.
At LaGuardia, Terminal A was shut down due to heavy flooding inside the building with shocking images of travelers trudging through what appeared to be several inches of water.
Areas of East Elmhurst severely flooded, including 23rd Street, which was toured by President Joe Biden in 2021 following the damage caused by Ida.
Throughout the day on Friday, local officials urged residents to refrain from going outside into the storm, while also accusing the mayor of failing to properly warn New Yorkers and respond to the storm in a timely manner.
Flood waters covered areas of Rockaway, East Elmhurst, Rosedale and other parts of Queens on Friday. Photo via Jagga Singh/TwitteR
“I want to urge my neighbors and all New Yorkers to take this storm seriously,” said State Senator Jessica Ramos. “We, unfortunately, know too well in East Elmhurst what devastation rain of this magnitude can have on our homes and safety.”
The heavy rain caused damage of its own, including at Elmhurst Hospital where buckets were placed to catch leaks.
According to City Councilmember Shekar Krishnan, the 30-year-old roof at the hospital began to leak on Friday, damaging the building’s mother-baby unit.
“CEO Helen Arteaga says the hospital was built to face any emergency except for Mother Nature,” Krishnan said on Twitter.
Congressmember Grace Meng reported significant flooding in several communities in her district, and argued that more needed to be done to fix the city’s infrastructure.
“Yet again, flooding is impacting Queens due to heavy rainfall,” she said in a statement. “This continues to be unacceptable and must be addressed. I again renew my call for the city and state to use money from the federal infrastructure bill to help combat the problem in our borough.”
On the low-lying Rockaway peninsula, flood waters engulfed streets where floods have become even more common in recent years as infrastructure fixes there have taken years to complete.
“You still need the infrastructure work to be done,” Queens Borough President Donovan Richards told the Eagle on the ground in Arverne on Thursday. “There's a lot of work. Before, I would say the conversation just centered around Southern Queens and Rockaway, [but] unfortunately, climate change impacts the entire borough now.”
Beach 67th in the Arverne section of the Rockaways flooded with water much of Friday afternoon. Eagle photo by Ryan Schwach
On Beach 67th Street, where Richards spoke to the Eagle amid the downpour, several inches of water stopped cars and completely overwhelmed storm drains. The block, one of the lowest lying in Rockaway, flooded even worse back in December, and has been the location of past and future green infrastructure work.
“This is why we need the Army Corps to move fast,” said Richards.
Richards, as many did on Friday, took issue with what he said was a slow response from the mayor and his administration, who didn’t publicly address the city on the flooding until around noon, well after areas like Park Slope and East Elmhurst were underwater, and almost an hour after the press conference was originally scheduled.
“[It was] flat footed,” said Richards. “The alert system is good to have…But the administration has to elevate these storms when they are coming. We cannot just have a NotifyNYC alert. It has to be elevated to a presser so that New Yorkers take it seriously.”
“You see the mayor standing on TV, you see the agencies standing on TV saying a major storm is coming, people will take it a little differently,” he added.
Ramos agreed, calling for more action in a statement released before the mayor’s press conference began.
“The National Weather Service warned of flash flooding on Thursday morning, why wasn’t a press release sent to local community and ethnic media? Instead, immigrant New Yorkers are now scrambling to deal with this flooding,” she said. “We need to get it together. When an emergency is headed our way, all other projects need to pause — and New Yorkers need to be warned. Early.”
At that 45-minute press conference with agency heads, Adams defended his response.
“All the necessary precautions were taken,” he said. “We followed the right protocol.”
Adams and his administration said they sent out a press release yesterday, and did enough to warn New Yorkers.
Mayor Eric Adams was accused by a number of elected officials of failing to respond to the storm in a timely manner on Friday. Photo by Caroline Rubinstein-Willis/Mayoral Photography Office
By the time Adams made his announcement to New Yorkers that they should in fact stay home, the videos of completely flooded intersections and flooded buses had been up for more than an hour.
Adams also defended his choice to not announce any precautions for city schools, which let out amid the floods Friday afternoon.
“If there was a need to close the schools, we would have made that call, but this was the right call,” he said. “Our children are safe in schools.”
Later on in the evening, while speaking on 1010 WINS radio, Adams said that “if anyone was caught off guard” it was because they had been living “under a rock.”
