Ida: New York City reels from surprise flooding and drowning deaths | Maag

Storms and flooding from the remnants of Hurricane Ida hit the New York metropolitan region with such ferocity on Wednesday night that even by midday Thursday, many people who narrowly escaped the disaster were still taking its measure. Pauly Guillermo woke up at 1 p.m. Thursday to find television news crews parked outside his door.

When he walked outside, he found the leftovers of an emergency. Police officers stood watch outside a home at the end of Guillermo’s block of 64th Street in Woodside, Queens. Repairmen with Con Edison climbed into a manhole in front of the house, fixing damage from the flood. Dozens of journalists and neighbors stood around in the heat, watching.

“What happened?” said Guillermo, 31, a construction worker.

I told him: A family died in their basement home. A 48 year-old woman, 50 year-old man and a 2 year-old baby drowned.

“Are you serious? That was here?” said Guillermo, who lives four doors up the hill. “I was here last night, in the house. I had no idea.”

The three victims were among the 12 people who died as Ida passed over New York City. Eleven of those people, police officials said, were in basements when they perished. 

Mayor Bill De Blasio declared a state of emergency across the city late Wednesday. By late Thursday, at least 40 people across New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania had been reported killed. In New Jersey, Gov. Phil Murphy reported 23 deaths late Thursday afternoon. 

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A few feet make a big difference

In the streets of Jamaica, Queens, in Bushwick, in subway stations in Manhattan and the neighborhoods of Passaic, New Jersey, the scenes were similar. Eyewitnesses standing on dry ground posted videos to social media of people kayaking through the streets, of cars pushing waves of water, of the stairwell of the 28th Street subway station erupting like a geyser.

A few feet of elevation made all the difference between losing everything or sleeping comfortably through the night, between death and life.

“We’re fine,” said Kevin Vasquez, who also lives on 64th Street in Woodside. “But some of our neighbors? Some of their garages and basements got flooded. They lost a lot.”

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This is what’s disorienting about Facebook and Twitter videos, and news reporting more generally. Videos from last summer’s Black Lives Matter protests seemed to show entire neighborhoods going up in flames, when in fact the damage was isolated and rare: one store looted on Broadway in Manhattan, one car dealership destroyed in Kenosha, Wisconsin.

The same holds true for natural disasters. Even in the midst of Wednesday’s huge storm, which covered the entire region from Philadelphia to Connecticut, the danger was actually quite isolated. Danielle Parhizkaran is a photographer for the USA TODAY Network. On Wednesday she was in Queens, shooting pictures and video of the U.S. Open inside Louis Armstrong Stadium. The open roof allowed wind and rain to pummel the court, stopping play.  

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From there she walked next door, to Arthur Ashe Stadium, which has a closed roof. There fans and her fellow journalists were surprised to learn of the inundation happening just outside. After that, Danielle switched to covering the storm.

“All of a sudden I’m out in this open area in knee-deep water, and there’s lighting,” Parhizkaran said. “There were umbrellas flying, people were screaming. I was like, ‘Oh, should I even be doing this?’”

As my friend risked her life in Flushing to cover the news, I sat on my couch four miles away in Sunnyside, Queens, totally oblivious. My phone kept buzzing with warnings, which I silenced and ignored. It had already been a long week. So I kept watching reruns of my favorite British car show.

Then I thought: What about my car? It’s the most expensive thing I own, and I park it in an underground garage, close to Newtown Creek, under a new building that was cheaply built. What if it’s floating? I walked there to find minor chaos. Cars weren’t floating, but the floor was wet, and the ceiling had partially collapsed from the rain.

Eventually Danielle escaped safely, and so did I with my car. But even after Superstorm Sandy, after Henri and Irma and Floyd, after Eta and Laura and Irene and Fay, the destruction from Ida took me by surprise. In New Jersey and New York, we receive the remnants from lots of hurricanes that hit other places first. We’re used to seeing news that Hurricane Harvey slammed into Texas, and Katrina and Ida pummeled New Orleans, but we here in the Northeast will be mostly fine.

It’s embarrassing to admit my own complacency. But I think I’m not alone. Maybe, hopefully, next time, I will finally remember: Human-caused climate change isn’t just real. It’s also here, in New York and New Jersey, right now. I got lucky this time. But I live with my family on the first floor, and I park my car underground. I’m not as safe as I think.

“I’ve lived here for 27 years. We’ve had flooding, but never this bad,” said Manuel Adriesen, a taxi driver who lives two doors uphill from the flooded house on 64th Street. “I didn’t think something like this could happen here.”

Time to wake up

David Robinson has been warning us about this for three decades. The day Ida hit was also the 30th anniversary of Robinson becoming New Jersey’s state climatologist. His own work tracking the retreat of winter snow, beginning in the 1980s, gave important early data that scientists' models about climate change were starting to come true in the physical world.

Rainstorms are too complex to say for certain whether they’re caused by climate change, Robinson said. But storms like Ida — which kept an extraordinary amount of its destructive power even as it moved up the Eastern Seaboard — fit climatologist’s models for how storms will behave in this new era of rapid change.

“I don’t like the term ‘new normal,’” Robinson said Wednesday, after the skies opened into a classically clear September day. “There’s nothing to say we’ve reached a plateau and it will stay the way it is.”

At a press conference Thursday, De Blasio, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul and Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-New York, all affirmed Robinson — they blamed climate change for what the mayor described as the “suddenness and brutality of storms now.”

“This is the biggest wake-up call we could possibly get.” De Blasio added.

Thursday brought tragedy to our region. No toddler should have to die such a terrifying death, trapped by a raging flood. The home faces a tall concrete wall that bounds the Long Island Expressway, where dozens of cars got stranded by the flood. Fourteen hours later, they were still there, broken and sitting in mud. All eastbound lanes of the highway were closed, forcing thousands of cars to divert into the neighborhood where the people died.

It all happened a short bike ride from my house, just steps from Guillermo’s house. At the time, neither of us knew this drama was unfolding. I can speak for myself: It’s time for me to wake up.

“Enough already,” Robinson said. “How much more of this do you have to see until you begin taking this seriously and do something about it?”

Staff writer Sammy Gibbons contributed to this report.

Christopher Maag is a columnist for the USA TODAY Network.

Email: maag@northjersey.com 

Twitter: @Chris_Maag