'We Need It Today:' Queens Leaders Demand Help After Major Storm

QUEENS, NY — 11 of the 13 New Yorkers killed on Wednesday night, when the remnants of Hurricane Ida brought historic flooding to the region, lived in Queens, according to the city.

Wednesday's deadly storm, which prompted the National Weather Service to issue its first-ever flash flood emergency for New York City, caused devastating flooding across Queens — the borough's latest incident of catastrophic flooding amid climate-change-induced natural disasters, which city officials warned will continue to disproportionately impact southeast Queens unless more infrastructure is invested in the area.

“There are many parts of this borough that historically have flooded and it’s only going to get worse, and unfortunately if we do not address climate change we will continue to lose lives,” said Borough President Donovan Richards at a news conference Thursday morning on 183 Street in Jamaica, where a mother and son died Wednesday night after their home flooded, reports show.

Congressman Gregory Meeks, who has represented southeast Queens for the entirety of his political career, echoed Richards’ comments about climate change and infrastructure, and called on Congress to pass a piece of “absolutely crucial” $3.5 trillion infrastructure legislation.

Meeks said that the infrastructure reconciliation legislation includes millions of dollars for “blocks like these, to improve the infrastructure and stop the flooding that we know takes place here.”

In 2018, however, the de Blasio Administration invested nearly $2 billion to build a comprehensive drainage system and alleviate flooding in neighborhoods across southeast Queens — work that Vincent Sapienza, commissioner of the city’s Department of Environmental Projection, or DEP, said at the news conference is “well underway” despite Wednesday’s flooding.

Instead, Sapienza credited the flooding to a rate of rainfall that “far exceeded the capacity of the system,” noting that Tropical Storm Henri brought about the same amount of rainfall to the city, but over a longer period of time.

“Anything more than two inches an hour we’re going to have trouble with,” he said in response to a question about how the city explains flooding across the borough, which caused deaths not only in Jamaica but also in Woodside, Forest Hills, Elmhurst, and Auburndale.

Most of the deaths in NYC occurred when water rushed into peoples' apartment, trapping them inside, but city officials said Thursday that at least one person in Queens died after a car accident on the Grand Central Parkway.

The city is going to conduct a “hydraulics assessment” in order to determine the cause of flooding in areas with severe flooding, Sapienza said.

Richards thanked de Blasio, who was also at the press conference, for his infrastructure investments, but called on the federal and state governments to complete promised infrastructure projects, including a project to protect the Rockaway Peninsula from long-term erosion, and a plan to reconstruct parts of Howard Beach after devastation from Superstorm Sandy.

“Queens needs to see much more infrastructure investment,” he said. “We cannot wait until tomorrow, we need it today. These lives could have been saved if we had investment that we sorely needed a long time ago.”

Critics, however, pushed back, suggesting that local officials could have done more to alert New Yorkers about the storm and ensure their safety. At the news conference one person asked why officials see this storm as a "warning" when these kinds of events are happening more regularly.

In response, Governor Kathy Hochul said the state needs to have evacuation and communication plans for all homeowners.

Mayor Bill de Blasio stood by the city's response, saying that the city's weather predictions made by the "very best experts" are then "made a mockery of in a matter of minutes" by no fault of their own.

"We need to start communicating to people that we should assume things are going to be much worse in literally every situation," he said. "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."