Queens pols want action as borough endures another week of severe flooding
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Queens was inundated with flooding twice in the last week as local officials called on the city to act. Photos courtesy of Councilmember Phil Wong’s office
By Ryan Schwach
Queens’ streets were deluged with flood water twice in the last week – an increasingly common problem for borough residents as severe rainstorms become more frequent.
On Thursday of last week, and again on Sunday, residential blocks in Queens and major highways were inundated with water. In late July, Queens roads flooded leaving drivers stranded on the Long Island Expressway.
Elected officials in Queens say their constituents are tired of constant flooding and are calling on City Hall to prioritize fixing the problem.
“I am angry, and frankly, my constituents are even angrier,” wrote Queens Councilmember Phil Wong in a letter to Mayor Zohran Mamdani on Sunday. “This is the fourth major flooding event in the last month alone. This is not something happening once every decade anymore. It happens multiple times a month.”
Wong, co-chair of the council’s conservative-leaning Common Sense Caucus, was also critical of the Mamdani administration’s response to flooding issues.
“The response from this administration continues to be press releases, sandbags and photo opportunities after the water has already entered someone's home,” he wrote.
Wong said he wants the city to begin redirecting funds to immediately address flooding in his district and around Queens through catch basin cleaning and long-needed fixes to the borough’s century old infrastructure.
“New York City needs a long-term investment in sewer capacity on a scale we have never seen before,” he wrote. “The storms we are experiencing today are not the storms this sewer system was designed to handle. We know that. The administration knows that. Continuing to respond to each flood as though it were an unexpected emergency is no longer acceptable.”
Wong also echoed sentiments made last month by his fellow Queens legislator Jim Gennaro.
Gennaro, the chair of the City Council’s Committee on Environmental Protection and Waterfronts, said the money to help combat flooding could come from city residents’ water payments. Currently, the funds go directly to the citywide general fund.
Last month, Gennaro told the Eagle that the Department of Environmental Protection “is literally being robbed of money that it needs to get us out of this flooding crisis.”
“Put those dollars toward the infrastructure New Yorkers actually depend on,” Wong echoed in his letter to the mayor “Give DEP the resources to get to work in my district and across this city.”
Queens Councilmember Phil Wong wrote a scathing letter addressed to the mayor over his administration’s response to flooding in his district and other parts of Queens. Will Alatriste/NYC Council Media Unit
“While my constituents are bailing out their basements and throwing away ruined belongings, City Hall is taking hundreds of millions of dollars generated by water bills and using it somewhere else,” he added. “That is unacceptable.”
Queens Borough President Donovan Richards told the Eagle in a phone call on Monday that he is fully behind the arguments in the lawmaker’s letter, referring to Queens’ recurrent flooding as a “state of emergency.”
“We need money and we need resources,” Richards said. “[Wong] is not wrong in his assessment of the need to ensure that there's a comprehensive plan. The bottom line is you have to invest in the infrastructure. It doesn't matter if it's Long Island City or Middle Village.”
Queens’ flooding issues have mostly migrated from the low-lying areas of Southeast Queens – where billions of dollars have been spent to mitigate the impacts of flooding and severe storms – to areas of central Queens where infrastructure can’t keep pace with the amount of rain hitting the borough on a weekly basis.
“When I wake up in the morning, I don't know where to look,” Richards said. “Before, it was just automatically Rosedale, it was automatically Far Rockaway. You're not really seeing those issues there anymore. Now I have Queens Center Mall to contend with.”
City Hall did not comment on Wong’s letter to the mayor.
During an unrelated press conference in Queens on Monday, Mamdani said that flooding is
“one of the foremost priorities for our administration.”
“We have a sewage system that was built for the rainfall of a century ago and that the climate crisis has intensified and increased that rainfall,” he said. “It is not going to be the case that we are simply going to sit on our hands until the day in which the sewage system is entirely overhauled.”
“We are exploring every single avenue that we have, whether it is from the installation of cloudburst technology to the use of permeable pavement to the question of floodable parks, parks that are actually built to absorb that kind of excess rainfall,” the mayor added.
In the most recent budget, Mamdani administration allocated $43.2 million to expand the city’s efforts around coastal resiliency in the city with the intention of hiring more workers to maintain city infrastructure.
The city DEP said the agency was aware of the flooding issues during both of the storms last week and deployed workers at multiple points to assess conditions and respond to specific complaints from residents.
“DEP is investing in flood prone neighborhoods and building out infrastructure across the city,” a department spokesperson said. “Our capital plan dedicates about $1 billion a year over the next decade to stormwater management projects and mitigation solutions.”
As of Monday afternoon, weather forecasts call for more rain and scattered thunderstorms in Queens for both Thursday and Friday.
