A man carries his belongings as he exits his vehicle in Mamaroneck, a suburb of New York, September 29, 2023. MIKE SEGAR / Portal
On the night of Thursday, September 28th to Friday, September 29th, very heavy rain fell in the northeastern United States, causing flooding in New York, where parts of the subway and airports were paralyzed.
Kathy Hochul, Governor of New York State declared a “state of emergency”. for New York, Long Island, east of the megalopolis and the Hudson Valley, due to “the extreme rainfall we are seeing,” she announced on X (formerly Twitter). According to local authorities, the following risk area is affected by the “flash flood”:
Images published by Agence France-Presse journalists, local media and on social networks showed vehicles struggling to move on flooded roads or even completely blocked because the water rose to the level of the cars’ windows.
Several stations on the megacity’s gigantic subway network are partially flooded and several central lines in Brooklyn are closed: “We continue to manage water on the tracks caused by flooding in several stations in Brooklyn and Manhattan,” it reported the official report of the New York Subway. For its part, La Guardia Airport announced that all entrances to Terminal A are “currently closed”.
“Up to 20 centimeters of rain by the end of the day”
Police officers help stranded motorists on a flooded Manhattan street near the Williamsburg Bridge in New York on September 29, 2023. ANDREW KELLY/Portal
The city’s mayor, Eric Adams, warned during a news conference that the rains would continue throughout the day. “We can expect up to 20 centimeters of rain by the end of the day,” he warned. New York Democratic Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said in an email to her constituents that 2 to 5 inches of rain fell in the boroughs of Manhattan, Queens and Brooklyn, with an additional 1 to 2 inches depending on the area be reckoned with.
According to the US Weather Service, the storm is caused by a low pressure system along the Atlantic coast that is drawing in moist air from the ocean and “producing areas of heavy rain over the northern and eastern regions.” These floods are taken seriously by the authorities of New York, where Hurricane Ida in September 2021 caused the deaths of thirteen people (and several dozen more in the region), most of whom were trapped in basements of houses converted into apartments , in a megacity struggling for survival with a severe housing shortage.
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