Upper East Siders File Dozens Of Damage Complaints After Storm

UPPER EAST SIDE, NY — After the remnants of Hurricane Ida pounded the city last week, officials asked New Yorkers to call 311 to report damage to their homes or streets.

On the Upper East Side, residents appear to have heeded that call. From the evening of Sept. 1 — when the storm rolled in — through Wednesday afternoon, Upper East Siders have filed 72 complaints to 311 about flooding, water damage, fallen trees and utility outages, city records show. That's 10 more than the week before.

Mapping the complaints helps show which parts of the Upper East Side suffered damage from the record rainfall and subsequent flooding.

Zoom in and click through the map below to explore each damage report. (Brown markers indicate flooded sewers and streets; blue markers are water leaks in buildings; green are damaged or fallen trees, and yellow are water or electric outages.)

The map shows damage to be spread evenly throughout the neighborhood — possibly bearing a slight resemblance to the neighborhood's topography, with lower-lying areas further east and uptown recording more complaints while the higher-elevation blocks closer to Central Park had fewer.

East 94th Street appeared especially hard-hit by fallen trees, with a half dozen reports spanning between Madison and York avenues. Buildings reporting utility outages included three on Second Avenue and two on East 80th Street, among eight others.

Backed-up sewers were reported mostly on side streets, including several in the east sixties, while the only report of street flooding was made on low-lying East End Avenue. Residential water leaks, meanwhile, were concentrated uptown, with about two-thirds being reported above East 80th Street.

Still, the Upper East Side recorded far fewer complaints than neighboring Harlem, where well over 400 have piled up in the wake of Hurricane Ida. Areas of Queens and Brooklyn that suffered more severe flooding and loss of life have reported hundreds of incidents of damage as well.

Insane rain in the #UpperEastSide right now!! #nycweather #nyc @nynjpaweather pic.twitter.com/f69rLfdm7N
— Ben Cathers (@bencathers) September 2, 2021

On the Upper East Side, the storm's most severe effect may have been the flooding along the FDR Drive, where oceanlike conditions forced drivers to abandon their vehicles Wednesday night as authorities shut down the waterside highway.

The neighborhood also had its voltage levels temporarily reduced the following day, as Con Edison made repairs in the wake of the storm.