NEW YORK (1010 WINS) -- New York City’s chief climate officer said Monday’s fast-moving tropical rainstorm was among the “most intense” the city’s aging infrastructure has handled—and warned it'll take decades to bring the system up to date, even as such storms plow through the Tri-State with more frequency.
“With last night, it is now the case that five of the most intense rainstorms in New York City’s history have taken place in the last four years,” Rohit Aggarwala said at a Tuesday briefing on the storm with Mayor Eric Adams.
Adams said that Central Park had its second-highest one-hour rainfall total on record—2.07 inches—only surpassed by the 3.15 inches that fell in an hour during Hurricane Ida in September 2021. The third—1.94 inches—was during Tropical Storm Henri in August 2021.
Soaking storms like the one Monday are often part of tropical systems that bring the sort of “intense but short bursts of rain we’ve been getting” that swamp the sewers, Aggarwala said.
“The pipes were designed for a certain amount of water,” he said, but “a lot more water fell from the sky.”
The storm brought 1 to 3 inches of rain to New York City, while suburbs to the north and west got around 3-6 inches in a matter of a couple of hours, causing catastrophic flood damage, particularly in North Jersey.
Flooding caused widespread travel disruption in the transit system and on roadways, including at the 23rd Street subway station on the 1 line and on the FDR Drive in Manhattan.
The storms’ increased frequency has been attributed to the effects of climate change, with the city’s sewer system—designed well over a century ago for up to 1.75 inches of rain per hour—now working to handle amounts that far exceed that.
Flooding has proven to be a stubborn problem for the subway system as well, 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. 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 Ida killed more than a dozen NYC residents and sent water cascading again into subways, renewing attention to resiliency proposals.
Aggarwala said it will cost billions more dollars over many years to continue to update and fix the city’s complex underground infrastructure.
“We’ve done a lot over the last three years, but as we have talked about at great length, addressing storm water resilience to fix this underground infrastructure is going to be the work of tens of years—decades,” he said.