‘Unimaginable loss’: Eleven from Queens die in storm
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Eleven people in Queens died as a result of the massive storm brought by Hurricane Ida on Wednesday, Sept. 1, 2021. Photo via Mayor Bill de Blasio/Twitter
By Jacob Kaye
While Wednesday’s historic storm caused destruction throughout the city and region last night, no other borough paid a bigger toll than Queens did.
The remnants of Hurricane Ida, which made landfall in Louisiana three days prior, killed 12 people, 11 of whom were from Queens, according to the authorities.
As the rain picked up in the evening, subway stations and tunnels flooded, service throughout nearly the entire MTA system was suspended and straphangers became trapped inside train cars. Businesses that took on water were unable to open their doors Thursday morning. Homes throughout Queens and New York City were destroyed.
“We're still uncovering the true depth of the loss, the human loss, which is hard to imagine, that people simply in their cars, in their homes, in their basements succumbed to the ravages of a brutal storm,” said Gov. Kathy Hochul at a press conference in Jamaica Thursday morning. “We want to assure all New Yorkers that were prepared for this and will do everything we can in our power to protect human life and property.”
The storm, which wrought 3.15 inches of rain over the course of one hour at one point, wasn’t expected to be as severe as it ended up being, according to Mayor Bill de Blasio.
“I think we now understand that every attempt at projection, bluntly, is failing us,” the mayor said. “Let's be clear, we're getting, from the very best experts, projections that then are made a mockery of in a matter of minutes.”
Fatal basement flooding
Of the 12 people confirmed dead as a result of the storm, 11 of them were from Queens and 10 lived in basement apartments.
Around 11:15 p.m., police arrived at 90-11 183 St., in Hollis, to find a 45-year-old woman and a 22-year-old man both unconscious inside their home, according to the NYPD. The man was pronounced dead at the scene and the woman was taken to a nearby hospital, where she was later pronounced dead.
A 48-year-old woman was found unconscious in her flooded home at 61-20 Grand Central Pkwy., at around 10:40 p.m., the NYPD said. She was taken to Forest Hills Hospital where she was pronounced dead.
About an hour later, police arrived at 44-60 64 St., in Woodside, where a 50-year-old man, 48-year-old woman and 2-year-old boy were all found dead in their flooded home, police said.
Around the same time, police responded to a 911 call for flooding at 55-35 84th St., in Elmhurst. Officers arrived to find an 86-year-old woman dead at the scene, according to the authorities.
At the press conference in Jamaica Wednesday, NYPD Commissioner Dermot Shea said that a ninth victim had been found dead in the backseat of a car after getting into a car crash along the Grand Central Parkway near Exit 5 in Queens. She was found Thursday morning, according to the commissioner.
Around noon on Thursday, two women and a man were found dead inside their Flushing home, according to the police.
“It's an unimaginable loss for New York City and for Queens right now,” Shea said. “We pray that the number does not go up.”
‘It looked like a river’
The bulk of the rain and flooding came around 9 p.m., according to the National Weather Service.
From 8:50 to 9:50 p.m., Central Park recorded 3.15 inches of rain, making it the wettest hour in New York City history – breaking the record set less than two weeks ago.
Around midnight, de Blasio declared a state of emergency and an hour later the New York City Office of Emergency Management instituted a travel ban, ordering all non-emergency vehicles off of the streets until the morning.
Queens residents awoke Thursday to find cars abandoned along major streets, presumably left by people unable to drive through the heavily flooded streets and rainy conditions.
An abandoned BMW sat beneath the Long Island Railroad tracks in Elmhurst with a sign on the dashboard that read, “FLOODED - Sorry.”
Meghan Schiereck, a Kew Gardens resident, told the Eagle that she saw multiple abandoned cars along the Grand Central Parkway and Union Turnpike while on her way to work.
“What normally takes me 10 [minutes] to get out of the neighborhood took me 45,” Schiereck said.
Queens residents could be seen setting out water-damaged clothing and other belongings to dry in the sun throughout the borough.
Ray Niesz said that the water was the highest he’d ever seen in his time as a maintenance worker at an Elmhurst apartment complex.
“It looked like a river. It channeled its way right in here,” he said. “We’ve got garage doors you can’t open. We’ve got 31 garage doors here, I’d say half of them are damaged.”
Some of the doors were visibly bent by the pressure of the floodwater.
Yvonne Wojcicki, of Rego Park, said the water was the most she had seen in her 15 years of living in the neighborhood.
“We were dealing with so much water on the terraces — I was bailing water out of there,” Wojcicki said.
She said her building managers were quick to alert her to the flooding garage, and said that the city sewer system appeared to be overwhelmed.
“The city drains backed up,” she added. “It was like a geyser coming out of the drains. An overwhelming amount of water.”
Another resident of the complex, Asim Zaman, was setting out by bicycle to help a friend in South Jamaica clean out a flooded basement apartment. He was running on little sleep, having spent hours on a stalled F train during the worst of the storm the night before.
“The front was flooded and the back was flooded,” Zaman said. “We could see the station lights — but we couldn’t do anything about it,”
Rego Park resident Asim Zaman was stuck on an F train during the storm Wednesday night and biked to help a friend whose basement flooded in South Jamaica Thursday morning. Eagle photo by Liam Quigley
Eventually, members of the FDNY evacuated Zaman and the other passengers, and he spent $70 dollars on an Uber ride home.
“I was there for Sandy, but even Sandy wasn’t too bad,” he added. “No one was prepared for this one.”
Public transit was also still in stasis Thursday morning. During the height of the storm, videos circulated on social media of waves of water rushing into underground stations. Several trains, filled with riders, had to be evacuated while still in the tunnels.
By 10:30 p.m., nearly every train line in the city was brought to a halt.
In all, 17 trains carrying 1,000 people had to be evacuated from the subway system, according to an MTA spokesperson.
As of Thursday afternoon, no subway line was in full operation. About half were running with delays and the other half were partially suspended. The W line was fully suspended.
Tracks in Queens suffered the most damage, according to the agency.
The flooding and damage left by the storm, also caused a brief delay in the workings of the court system, according to the Office of Court Administration.
Supreme Court in all five New York City counties opened late on Thursday, according to an OCA spokesperson. All other courts were in normal operation.
Around 16,400 homes and businesses in New York City and Westchester were without power Thursday afternoon, according to Con Edison.
In Queens, the largest number of outages came in Jackson Heights, Elmhurst and Ridgewood.
Businesses in Queens also had a hard time opening their doors after the storm, according to Tom Grech, the president and CEO of the Queens Chamber of Commerce.
Grech said that he had been inundated with calls from business owners in need of help.
“The rising waters that came so, so quick, they really caught a lot of people off guard, maybe we shouldn't have been, but a lot of people were caught off guard,” Grech said. “Today is about recovery and trying to figure out what got damaged and what wasn't.”
Ahead of Labor Day, businesses and restaurants, in particular, were gearing up for a busy weekend of service. Several had their basements flooded, damaging perishable and nonperishable goods alike, Grech said.
“It's another shot to the small businesses of Queens County, and New York City in general,” he added. “If nothing else, we’re a resilient bunch who will recover, but boy, I'll tell you, trying times.”
‘Woe is us’
Elected leaders gathered in Jamaica Thursday, including Queens Borough President Donovan Richards, City Councilmember I. Daneek Miller, Rep. Gregory Meeks and Sen. Chuck Schumer, all pointed to the alarming regularity at which New York City is now experiencing catastrophic climate events.
“Global warming is upon us,” Schumer said. “When you get to record rainfalls in a week, it's not just coincidence, when you get all the changes that we have seen in weather, that's not a coincidence.”
Queens residents abandoned their cars on the road Wednesday night during the worst of the storm.
Eagle photo by Liam Quigley
“Woe is us, if we don't recognize these changes are due to climate change, woe is us,” he added. “If we don't do something about it quickly, both in building resilient infrastructure and going to clean power, whether it's in homes and transportation, to stop global warming or at least reduce its awful effects on this country.”
Southeast Queens has been home to regular flooding for decades. In 2019, over 70 homes were flooded with raw sewage after a pipe burst. Many homeowners have yet to be paid by the city for the damage, the New York Times reported in April.
Nearly a dozen city-funded projects aimed at making the neighborhood more resilient have been started and completed in the past five years. However, it wasn’t enough to prevent the deaths of several people Wednesday night.
“The loss of lives is unacceptable,” said Miller, whose own home was flooded in the storm. “We absolutely have to make sure that we're taking care of families.”
Miller said that the infrastructure projects designed to reduce flooding in Southeast Queens have not done what they were promised to do.
“We're still here today and so there has to be oversight,” Miller said. “And we have to figure out what we're not doing right.”
Julie Tighe, the president of the New York League of Conservation Voters, said that infrastructure projects must be started as soon as possible to mitigate the climate catastrophes that are likely to continue.
“What happened last night in New York City and along the east coast is tragic and something that we're sadly going to see more and more of,” Tighe said. “It’s not a mystery that Southeast Queens has a problem with flooding, it’s not new. It didn't take this particular storm to highlight that.”
“We need to figure out how to address that in a way that's fair for communities and prevents their homes and their businesses from being flooded in a way that's highly disruptive and damaging, and, in the worst case, causes loss of life,” she added.
Additional reporting by Liam Quigley.
