When severe storms hit New York City, workers at Empire Luggage Center in SoHo make sure the suitcases and other merchandise stored in the basement, which regularly floods, are elevated.
At nearby Flipper’s, a restaurant known for its soufflé pancakes, garbage bags are kept handy to distribute to customers to wear over their shoes when they are leaving.
But at the longstanding French bistro Felix, the owner has learned to wait out the storm and clean up after it passes. “We’ve been here for 35 years,” said Alain Denneulin, the owner. “Here, there’s nothing you can do but pray.”
Mr. Denneulin said flooding in SoHo used to be worse until “the city fixed the streets” about 10 years ago. But now that storms are stronger and more frequent because of climate change, the sewers are backing up again, he said. And businesses are on their own to deal with it, he said.
On Tuesday, business owners and residents in low-lying areas around the city were bracing for another evening of flooding, after being pummeled by downpours on Saturday. Videos of waterfalls in subway stations and of narrow city streets turning into gushing streams went viral over the weekend. Severe storms are expected to strike the area in the late afternoon and evening on Tuesday, according to the National Weather Service, which said parts of the Lower Hudson Valley, Connecticut and New Jersey had already been inundated earlier in the day. There are flash flood warnings for all of New York City, except for Staten Island, the National Weather Service said.
“Please exercise caution,” Mayor Zohran Mamdani posted on social media on Monday night. “City agencies are prepared to respond, but we need everyone to be careful out there.”
Mr. Denneulin and other business owners said they often couldn’t count on the city for help. “We call 311 but often no one shows up,” he said.
Over the weekend, his staff cleaned the sidewalks and streets with bleach and a water-pressure hose to get rid of the stench from the sewer water. Other SoHo business owners said they called the city last weekend to complain as well and got no response.
Once a flood watch has been announced, representatives from the city’s environmental protection, sanitation and transportation departments work to clear major thoroughfares and check and clean about 1,000 of the city’s highest priority catch basins, said Beth DeFalco, a spokeswoman for the city’s Department of Environmental Protection. Catch basins have a chamber to capture debris that comes in with storm water before it moves into the city’s sewer system.
“Topography matters,” Ms. DeFalco said. Most of the priority storm drains are in low-lying areas, she explained. Even when those catch basins are clear, if storm drains on higher ground are clogged, the water will still flow downhill, and more trash along with it, which can reclog catch basins below, she said.
It’s also difficult for city officials to predict where the heavy rain will occur because of “the scattered nature and the intense pockets we are seeing,” she said.
Ms. DeFalco, who lives in Red Hook, a low-lying coastal neighborhood in central Brooklyn, said it did not flood last weekend, but nearby Greenpoint, another coastal area at the northern tip of Brooklyn, “got walloped.”
In March, Mr. Mamdani announced that the city would invest $108 million to upgrade some of the city’s catch basins, but Lisa Garcia, who leads the Department of Environmental Protection, said in a Spectrum News NY1 interview on Tuesday that New Yorkers needed to be vigilant about cleaning catch basins in their neighborhoods. “We now need to change our culture around raining and storms,” she said.
Kissena Park, near Flushing, Queens, floods regularly, since it dips down, like a bowl. One resident said that his neighbors regularly cleaned their storm drains, but the area still floods. And last weekend was no exception.
For his own home, he has added a check valve, a device that makes liquid flow in only one direction, to stop the sewer from backing up in his home. He has also installed a new sump pump in his basement and he surrounds his basement entrance with sandbags before every storm.
The man, who did not want his name used for safety reasons, said it’s terrible to live in fear every time a storm passes, and expressed hope that the city would speed up its planned work in the area to stop the flooding.
Ms. DeFalco said that major infrastructure projects can take years to design and complete. Last weekend, a member of the City Council sent her a video of a business — one of many — that was flooding along Knickerbocker Avenue in Bushwick, in northern Brooklyn. “We’re doing a $390 million project to upsize the sewers there, but those large projects take time,” Ms. DeFalco said. But construction on it is not scheduled to begin until 2029. “It won’t help us in time for this storm.”
Kitty Bennett contributed research.
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