Flood Advisory Hits Brooklyn and Queens Sunday Morning, Sidewalk Surfing Strongly Discouraged

Frequent flood advisories in New York’s low-lying boroughs reveal both the city’s persistent vulnerability and the lack of urgency in confronting its soggy future.

At 8:38 a.m. on an otherwise unremarkable June Sunday, Brooklyn and Queens’ morning routines were interrupted by a new normal: the shrill tones of a National Weather Service (NWS) flood advisory, cautioning residents to avoid flooded streets. For two hours, swathes of the city’s eastern flank hunkered down, steeling themselves against streets already awash from excessive rain. While the advisory expired at 10:45 a.m. without major incident, the episode serves as both a barometer and a harbinger—a city perpetually ankle-deep, bracing for a deluge that is increasingly less exceptional.

The NWS’s warning, terse but ominous—“Flooding caused by excessive rainfall is expected… Minor flooding in low-lying and poor drainage areas”—has, by now, entered the city’s collective muscle memory. Instructive tips followed: “Turn around, don’t drown when encountering flooded roads.” In New York’s sodden corners, such warnings land with an air of weary predictability. From Kensington basements to Flushing avenues, the risks, and often the responses, have a dispiriting familiarity.

For New York City, the price of ignoring these advisories is more than inconvenience. Minor flooding disrupts traffic, snarls deliveries, and renders Uber surge pricing even more piratical than usual. Each downpour means another dozen calls to the FDNY for stranded vehicles, another subway station set temporarily adrift. While fatalities remain mercifully rare—most deaths nationwide occur when would-be commuters try driving through deceptively shallow water—the cumulative effect on the city’s beleaguered infrastructure is grimly persistent.

The first-order economic implications are hardly negligible. One inch of water in a retail basement can translate into thousands in property damage and business interruption. Insurance claims, where not excluded due to the fine print on “acts of God,” nibble away at small business viability in neighbourhoods already pressed by high rents and tepid post-pandemic foot traffic. The city’s Department of Environmental Protection, guardian of its stormwater infrastructure, acknowledges that many catch basins and sewers date to the days of Tammany Hall—hardly designed for the “cloudbursts” that now periodically hammer outer-borough streets.

The second-order effects ripple outward. Flood advisories seldom mandate evacuation, but the spectre of inundation shadows every discussion about property values in eastern Brooklyn and Queens: Canarsie and Jamaica homeowners eye their foundations nervously with each rainfall. Persistent flooding accelerates the decay of roads and utilities, compounding costs for the city’s Department of Transportation and the MTA. Politically, there is little upside in promising a fix—public works upgrades tend to be both gargantuan and glacial, and voters are quick to punish failure but reluctant to reward foresight.

At the human scale, repeated advisories foster a corrosive kind of fatalism. The city’s warnings are byzantine in their gradations—advisory, watch, warning—yet each portends the same inconvenience for those who cannot afford to work remotely: longer commutes, sodden shoes, lost wages. Immigrant communities, often perched in the city’s cheapest, most flood-prone housing, carry a disproportionate share of the risk. Calls for “resilience” often ring hollow in households where the last insurance reimbursement was a decade overdue.

A rising tide, everywhere

Such chronic urban sogginess is far from a uniquely New York affliction. All along the Atlantic seaboard, flood advisories have become as ubiquitous as summer heat warnings: Boston’s MBTA has learned what New Yorkers have long known, that subway tunnels double as impromptu aqueducts. Miami, one of a handful of American cities with even less topographical relief than Brooklyn, spends lavishly on pumps and elevates roads—often shifting, rather than solving, the problem. London and Tokyo, both more accustomed to biblical rainfall, have invested in monstrous subterranean reservoirs and vast flood gates. New York’s legislative appetite for equivalent works appears, by comparison, puny.

While climate change remains the mother of all deluges, the city’s urban planners admit that local choices compound natural risks. Zoning anomalies have permitted rampant development of ill-advised cellar apartments, while the city’s $10bn coastal defense mega-projects remain, as of 2024, locked in litigation and bureaucracy. The “interim” solutions—public advisories, hasty sandbags, and exhortations to stay dry—are starting to look alarmingly permanent.

We see in Sunday morning’s episode not a freak event, but a microcosm of New York’s fitful adaptation. The city’s response is better than nothing, but a far cry from what is necessary. The body politic remains adept at issuing advisories, but appears worryingly resigned to its swimmers’ fate. Other metropolises wielding comparable assets have reckoned with more robust infrastructure, or at least devised grander plans.

If New Yorkers are to avoid lifetimes of living under water, “turn around, don’t drown” will need to evolve: from a service announcement to a rallying cry for investment. Mere caution has its limits. A city that aspires to remain a global hub cannot perpetually rely on luck and umbrella sales. Our verdict: the water’s rising faster than political will, and the city’s resilience strategy remains half-baked.

As Sunday’s drizzle dries, what lingers is a sense that advisories alone cannot stem the tide. New York City would do well to swap resignation for ambition—or risk being washed away with the rest of yesterday’s news. ■