By Jonathan Allen and Brendan O’Brien
NEW YORK (Reuters) -A sustained round of torrential downpours after a week of mostly steady rainfall triggered flash flooding in New York on Friday, disrupting subway service in the most populous U.S. city, inundating basements and turning some streets into small lakes.
A flash flood warning was in effect for New York until 2:30 p.m. EDT, with as much as 6 inches (15 cm) of rain falling in some locations, including Brooklyn, lower Manhattan and John F. Kennedy International Airport in the borough of Queens, said Zack Taylor of the National Weather Service.
Across the region, another 2 to 3 inches (5 to 8 cm) could fall before the system pushed out to sea, and some locations could see even more, said Taylor, a meteorologist with the service’s Weather Prediction Center in College Park, Maryland
“This is seriously a life-threatening situation,” he said, warning against travel until the rainfall abated later on Friday evening.
The extreme rainfall prompted New York Governor Kathy Hochul to declare a state of emergency for New York City, Long Island, and the Hudson Valley, and some National Guard troops were deployed to assist in the response.
Flooding caused major disruptions to New York’s subway service and the Metro-North commuter rail service, according to the Metropolitan Transportation Agency, which operates both. Some subway lines were suspended entirely, and many stations were closed.
New York Mayor Eric Adams declared a state of emergency for the city.
“This is time for heightened alertness and extreme caution,” he said at a morning news conference. “If you are at work or school, shelter in place for now.”
Systems producing intense rainfalls such as Friday’s have become more common in many parts of the U.S., including the New York City area.
Global warming has produced more extreme weather patterns in many parts of the world, according to climate scientists.
The rain capped one of New York’s wettest Septembers on record, with 13.74 inches (34.9 cm) of rain falling during the month as of 11 a.m. on Friday, and more on the way, said Dominic Ramunni, a forecaster with the weather service’s office in the city. The all-time high was set in September 1882 when 16.82 inches (42.72 cm) of rain fell.
“I don’t know if we’ll beat the record, but we’ll come close,” Rammuni said.
Despite the warnings, the city’s public schools were open for the day. Some buildings experienced flooding but no operations were affected, a district spokesperson said.
At least one suburban district, Bronxville in New York’s Westchester County north of New York, dismissed students early because of the worsening flooding.
Patti Zhang, 43, a social worker from New Hyde Park, near the border of New York City and Long Island’s Nassau County, lives around the corner from the elementary school her three children attend. So the family braved the weather and walked to school on Friday morning.
In some spots the water pooling on the street was 5 inches (13 cm) deep, she said, spilling over the tops of her children’s rain boots. Zhang said she had to make a second trip to school to deliver dry shoes and socks for them.
“This is crazy,” she said. “When will this stop?”
Floodwaters marooned vehicles on neighborhood streets and poured into subway stations, disrupting morning traffic for millions of commuters.
Mohammed Doha, a 52-year-old construction worker who lives in a ground-level, two-bedroom apartment in The Hole, a low-lying wedge of blocks on the border between Brooklyn and Queens, splashed through his kitchen in sandals.
“If they would have a proper drainage system like the other areas of the city, then we wouldn’t have this problem,” he said. “We are really, really suffering.”
Yasiel Ogando, a 38-year-old hospital worker who lives in The Hole with her family, complained that the city gave residents no warning about the flooding. Neighborhood meetings with city officials to make their area less prone to flooding have gone nowhere.
“Broken promises,” she said, after a morning trying to bail water mixed with sewage out of the basement of the family home. “Nothing gets done. It’s really bad. It’s terrible.”
In neighboring New Jersey, low-lying Hoboken, a city directly across the Hudson River from lower Manhattan, declared a state of emergency, with all but one of the southern routes into town under water.
The city’s newly installed floodgates, designed to close automatically when water pooled on roadways, were down, blocking many streets to vehicular traffic.
Friday’s deluge followed a bout of heavy downpours and unrelenting winds last weekend from the remnants of Tropical Storm Ophelia. That storm soaked New York City and caused widespread power outages in North Carolina, Virginia, Pennsylvania and New Jersey.
In New York, intermittent rain this week further saturated the ground, setting up conditions conducive to flash flooding.
(Reporting by Jonathan Allen and Bing Guan in New York, Brendan O’Brien in Chicago, and Rich McKay in Atlanta; Writing by Frank McGurty; editing by Jonathan Oatis)
