Over 200 Damage Complaints Filed In Astoria, LIC After Storm

ASTORIA-LONG ISLAND CITY, QUEENS — After the remnants of Hurricane Ida inundated the city with torrential rains and deadly flooding last week, officials asked New Yorkers to call 311 to report damage to their homes or streets.

In Astoria and Long Island City, where apartments flooded and some people "lost everything,"residents appear to have heeded that call.

During the past week — from the evening of Sept. 1 when the storm rolled in, through Wednesday, Sept. 8 — neighbors in northwest Queens filed 229 complaints to 311 about sewer backup, flooding, fallen trees, utility outages, and general storm-related damage, city records show. The week before only 84 complaints came in about those same issues, which is nearly three times fewer than the number of complaints post-Ida.

Patch mapped the complaints to show which parts of Astoria and Long Island City suffered damage from the storm. Click through the map below to explore each damage report. (Brown markers indicate backed-up sewers; blue are flooding issues; green are fallen trees; yellow are power outages and utility problems, and purple are general storm-related damage.)

Mapping storm-related 311 complaints in Astoria and Long Island City

Over half — or 126 — of the storm-related complaints in Astoria and Long Island city were sewer backups, making that issue the most commonly reported kind of post-Ida damage in the neighborhood.

Most of the reports of downed trees and general storm damage came from Astoria and Ditmars Steinway, whereas Long Island City only saw one of each kind of complaint.

In general, the largest cluster of complaints from northwest Queens were in Ditmars Steinway, an area that's more recently gentrified than eastern parts of Astoria. By contrast, Long Island City saw a much smaller cluster of complaints, amounting to just over 10 percent of storm-related reports from northwest Queens.

A quarter of downed tree reports came from Astoria Park, where videos show sidewalks all but turning to rivers and water eroding paths.

No Astoria residents died in the storm, but in the nearby neighborhoods of Elmhurst and Woodside a total of four people were found dead in their basement units, including a 2-year-old boy. Those Queens residents are among at least 11 New Yorkers who were trapped in their homes during the storm and drowned.

All told, the hurricane is now linked to the death of at least 13 New Yorkers, most of whom lived in Queens.

Government response to the storm

In the week after the storm, city officials and President Biden alike, have called for action to address climate change and invest in climate-resilient infrastructure, especially in frontline, low-income communities, like those in southeast Queens where a mother and son died last Wednesday night.

"The threat [of climate change] is here, and it's not going to get any better. The question is if it's going to get any worse," said the president on Tuesday, speaking from a block in East Elmhurst, a community where one elderly woman died during the storm.

Critics, however, pushed back against the city and the federal governments’ responses, suggesting that local officials could have done more to alert New Yorkers about the flooding and ensure their safety, and that the president should focus on the Green New Deal and building “fossil free” infrastructure.

Mayor Bill de Blasio, who stood by his administration's response, admitted that the city's weather predictions were "made a mockery of in a matter of minutes" and warned New Yorkers to assume the worst going forwards.

"From now on what I think we do is tell New Yorkers to expect the very, very worst. It may sound alarmist at times, but unfortunately, it's being proven by nature," he said. The de Blasio Administration plans to revamp the city's disaster notification system, especially for at-risk residents of basement apartments, and issue more travel bans, during future storms.