A kayaker paddles along a section of Interstate 676 after flooding from heavy rains in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
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A kayaker paddles along a section of Interstate 676 after flooding from heavy rains in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Climate change and shaky infrastructure were blamed on Friday for the scale of the flooding that hit New York as the remnants of Hurricane Ida swept across the northeastern US, killing at least 47 people.
“We're in a completely different world,” New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio said after the flash floods. “This is a different challenge.”
The record rain turned roads into rivers and shut down metro services as water collapsed onto tracks. Nearly a dozen people drowned in underground apartments.
The extreme weather conditions, combined with a lack of preparation, stretched the largest city in the United States to the breaking point.
“It's not a big surprise that the city seems to collapse every time there's a big storm,” said Jonathan Bowles, executive director of the Center for an Urban Future think tank.
“The city's infrastructure has not kept up with the population growth that New York has had over the past two decades, let alone the increasing ferocity of storms and sea level rise that has occurred with climate change,” Bowles said.
While there has been a lot of investment in major projects – train stations, airports, new bridges – less funding has been allocated to “unsexy” projects such as sewer lines and water networks, he said.
Nicole Gelinas, an urban economics expert at the Manhattan Institute, another think tank, said New York's infrastructure “wasn't built for seven inches of rain in a few hours.”
This handout satellite image released by Maxar Technologies shows homes and railroad tracks in Manville, New Jersey after record-breaking rainfall.
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This handout satellite image released by Maxar Technologies shows homes and railroad tracks in Manville, New Jersey after record-breaking rainfall.
The drains for the city's sewer system are getting clogged, Gelinas said, and “there's not enough green space to catch some of the water before it runs into the drains.
“So some of these avenues become canals when there's a big storm.”
New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania were hardest hit by Ida, which ravaged the southern state of Louisiana and the Gulf Coast earlier in the week before sweeping through the Northeast.
President Joe Biden, who has made climate change threats a priority, flew to Louisiana, where more than 800,000 people were without power after Ida made landfall as a Category 4 storm.
He said costly improvements to the levee system around New Orleans after the much deadlier Hurricane Katrina in 2005 had proven their value in preventing more catastrophic damage this time around.
Similar transformative infrastructure projects — rather than simply rebuilding — should become the new norm, he said, pushing for passage of his giant $3.5 trillion infrastructure bill in Congress.
Flood waters surround vehicles after heavy rain on an expressway in Brooklyn, New York.
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Flood waters surround vehicles after heavy rain on an expressway in Brooklyn, New York.
“Things have changed so drastically in terms of the environment that you've already crossed a certain threshold,” he said.
“You can't rebuild a road, highway or bridge back to what it was before.”
like a “jungle”
New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy said Hurricane Ida had left 25 people dead in his state, most of them “people trapped in their vehicles.”
Thirteen deaths were reported in New York City, including 11 victims who were unable to escape their basements, police said.
Three people were killed in suburban Westchester, New York, while five others died in Pennsylvania and one — a state trooper — in Connecticut, officials said.
“I'm 50 years old and I've never seen this much rain,” said Metodija Mihajlov, whose basement restaurant in Manhattan was flooded with three inches of water.
“It was like living in the jungle, like tropical rain. Unbelievable. Everything is so strange this year,” Mikhailov told AFP.
The National Weather Service recorded 3.15 inches of rain in New York's Central Park in just one hour — surpassing the record set just last month during Hurricane Henri.
The US Open tennis tournament was halted as howling wind and rain blew under the corners of the Louis Armstrong Stadium roof.
It's rare for such storms to hit America's northeast coast, and they come as the surface layer of the oceans warms due to climate change.
Global warming is causing cyclones to become stronger and carry more water, posing a growing threat to the world's coastal communities, scientists say.
“Global warming is upon us and it's going to get worse and worse if we don't do something about it,” said New York Senator Chuck Schumer.
