A man scrambling to save a dog from a flooding basement in Brooklyn. Another man trying to do repairs in a Manhattan boiler room as rain water rushed in.
New details have emerged about the two men who died during Thursday’s storm that dropped nearly three inches of rain in two hours. Emergency management Commissioner Zach Iscol said during an interview Friday morning that one inch of rain fell over a particularly intense 10-minute period.
A 39-year-old man died in a basement on Kingston Avenue in East Flatbush while attempting to save a dog, police said. A 43-year-old man died in the boiler room of a building on West 175th Street in Washington Heights while attempting to make repairs, according to the NYPD. Authorities declined to release the names of either victim.
Both buildings are listed as in areas with “minimal flood hazard,” according to a flood map funded by the city and state. Mayor Eric Adams said fall foliage had clogged some storm drains, worsening the effects of the deluge.
National Weather Service meteorologist Dave Radell said the rainfall totals were well within the forecasted amount, but happened in a shorter timeframe than anticipated – mostly between 3 p.m. and 5 p.m.
“The one pretty good thing about this system is at least it was moving. If it had stalled, or had moved a little bit slower, we would have had those high rainfall rates for a longer period of time over some areas,” Radell said.
The hardest-hit neighborhoods were Bedford-Stuyvesant, Crown Heights and uptown Manhattan.
New York City’s sewer system was designed to only handle 1.75 inches of rain an hour.
By comparison, Hurricane Ida – which killed 13 people across the city in 2021 – dropped more than 3 inches of rain across much of the five boroughs within a single hour. Some neighborhoods received up to 9 inches of rain in total by the time the storm was over.
Eleven of those people died in basement apartments which were illegal at the time.
Just last week, the city’s Department of Buildings launched an online application for homeowners who want to turn their basements, attics and similar spaces into legal rental units – part of an effort to alleviate New York’s housing crunch.
The legalization effort comes with new safety rules that were created in July. The proposed units need to have at least two exits and a sprinkler system, and the city will prohibit basement apartments in flood-prone areas.
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