NEW YORK (AP) — Two people in New Jersey were killed after their vehicle was swept up in flood waters during a storm that moved across the U.S. Northeast overnight, authorities said Tuesday.
Gov. Phil Murphy, a Democrat, noted the deaths occurred in the northern New Jersey city of Plainfield where there were two storm-related deaths July 3. A third person was killed in North Plainfield during that previous storm.
“We’re not unique, but we’re in one of these sort of high humidity, high temperature, high storm intensity patterns right now,” Murphy told reporters after touring storm damage in Berkeley Heights. “Everybody needs to stay alert.”
The names of the two latest victims were not immediately released Tuesday. Local officials said the vehicle they were riding in was swept into a brook during the height of the storm.
Flooding in the New York subway
At one stop in Manhattan, viral videos posted online showed water flooding down into a Manhattan subway station, submerging the platform while passengers inside a train watch. Another photo appears to show passengers standing on a train’s seats to avoid the water beginning to soak the floor.
Janno Lieber, chair and CEO of the Metropolitan Transit Authority, told 1010 WINS that the city’s sewer system got overwhelmed by the rain and backed up into the subway tunnels and to the stations.
"The city's sewer system does not have the capacity to manage a torrential rainfall of the kind we had last night for an hour," Lieber said. "The system only accommodates an inch-and-a-half to an inch-and-three-quarters. Last night, for an hour we had more than 2 inches, then the water starts to back up into the subway—tunnels and into the stations."
Lieber said there was now full subway service, as well as full Long Island Railroad and Metro North commuter rail service after hundreds of people worked overnight to restore operations.
Flooding has proven to be a stubborn problem for New York’s subway system, despite years and billions of dollars’ worth of efforts to waterproof them.
Superstorm Sandy in 2012 prompted years of subway repairs and flood-fighting ideas, and some have been put into practice. In some places, transit officials have installed or are installing storm barriers at subway station entrances, seals beneath subway air vents and curbs to raise the vents and entrances above sidewalk level.
Meanwhile, summer thunderstorms and the remains of hurricanes have repeatedly flooded parts of the subway system anew. In 2021, the remnants of Hurricane Ida killed more than a dozen New York City residents, largely in basement apartments, and sent water cascading again into subways, renewing attention to resiliency proposals.
The storm's effects in New Jersey and Pennsylvania
This latest storm prompted multiple water rescues in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, where streets and basements flooded after roughly 7 inches of rain fell. Some roads remained closed in parts of Pennsylvania and New Jersey on Tuesday. Murphy said the pavement buckled in some locations and state and local officials were assessing the level of damage in several counties, noting the White House had reached out to his office.
A major east-to-west highway in New Jersey was closed to make emergency repairs while dozens of flights were delayed or canceled at area airports Tuesday, including at least 173 total cancellations at Newark Liberty Airport, according to FlightAware data.
Most flash flood watches and warnings had expired in parts of New Jersey, New York and Pennsylvania as the rain moved on.
In one flooded North Plainfield, New Jersey, neighborhood, a house caught on fire and collapsed. Murphy said there was an explosion at the house but the family was not home and there were no injuries. The cause was under investigation.
An overwhelmed sewage system
New York City officials said their venerable sewer system worked as well as it could but simply was not built to handle rain that fell at the second-highest rate ever recorded in Central Park, surpassed only by the remnants of 2021’s Hurricane Ida.
“Imagine putting a two-liter bottle of water into a one-liter bottle. Some of it’s going to spill,” Environmental Protection Commissioner Rohit Aggarwala said at a virtual news briefing Tuesday.
The city doesn’t run the subway system — it’s under the separate Metropolitan Transportation Authority — but Aggarwala said the two entities have been collaborating to clean sewers near 45 flood-prone subway stations. The city also has sketched out plans to upgrade sewers to handle more water, estimating it would take $30 billion to do so in about 80 areas that need it most. The city currently spends about $1 billion a year on stormwater management.