Heavy rains continued to slam New York City on Friday after some commuters were forced to trek through spontaneous lakes as water flooded streets and gushed into subway stations.
The National Weather Service issued tropical storm and flash flood warnings until at least Friday afternoon. Maximum winds were pegged at 50 mph as Tropical Storm Elsa moved across Long Island and parts of northern New Jersey at 31 mph as of early Friday.
Videos and photos posted to social media from around the city showed water pouring down subway stairs as undeterred riders waded through the flash floods to reach their trains. Police on Thursday had to rescue more than a dozen people on a portion of the Major Deegan Expressway in the Bronx, the New York Times reported, after flooding near 179th Street appeared to halt traffic.
Sarah Feinberg, the interim president of New York City Transit, told The Washington Post on Friday that while the subways “frequently have flooding in extremely heavy rain,” the system is already equipped to regularly pump out millions of gallons of water.
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“Despite videos you’re seeing and despite three inches of rain in two hours, the system actually performed quite well,” she said. “Drains cleared flooding in most places efficiently; service was not terribly impacted in many places.”
The severe weather came on the final day of Elsa’s unwelcome tour up the East Coast before it was finally set to pull away from the Lower 48. It has affected the rest of the state, such as Westernville, N.Y., where videos and images posted to social media showed how serious thunderstorms caused trees to be uprooted and roofs to be ripped off. A survey is being conducted to see whether the storms were part of a tornado, according to the National Weather Service.
The tri-state area has also been hit by flooding, especially in Connecticut where several inches of rain affected cities like Hartford and New Haven on Friday.
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More than an inch and a half of rain fell in New York City in just an hour, among the top 10 most intense hourly cloud bursts in the past 80 years. By midevening, underpasses and highways were flooding as water gushed into the subway system. While the flooding was caused by thunderstorms from a stalled front in the area, The Post’s Matthew Cappucci noted that moisture from Elsa probably intensified the downpours.
Officials have told New Yorkers to be on alert for Elsa adding more rain and flash floods to the area in the coming days.
Share this articleShareSeveral videos showing New Yorkers determined to reach their destinations went viral on Twitter on Thursday. One video, now viewed more than 9 million times, showed a woman splashing into a pool of water at the 157th Street station on the 1 line in Washington Heights, apparently trying to catch her train.
People in a separate video could be seen putting on trash bags to stay dry as they enter a flooded station. Another video, taken at the 149th St.-Grand Concourse subway station in the Bronx, showed water pouring down a staircase.
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Despite the extreme conditions, train service remained largely uninterrupted, Feinberg said, noting that the water was receding. Only the northernmost portion of the A line, which runs through Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens, was temporarily shut down.
Eric Adams, who this week was declared the winner of the city’s Democratic mayoral primary, told The Post in a statement that more was needed to improve the subway system, blasting city spending for not addressing issues that could have helped mitigate the flooding.
“This level of danger and dysfunction is what happens when the MTA makes bad spending decisions for decades,” said Adams, who is favored to win November’s mayoral election. “This cannot be the way New York operates.”
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