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How lucky for yr Wonkette that Friday has seen the convergence of several of our favorites: Eric Adams, crumbling infrastructure, and biblical, Irwin-Allen-movie levels of flooding in New York City.
Friday morning the Big Apple was deluged so hard with rain that Noah was heard to remark “O Lord, isn’t this a bit much?” Streets flooded. Subways flooded. Even terminals at fucking La Guardia flooded, which certainly gives airlines a never-before-heard excuse to cancel flights.
Did Trump Tower flood? If Trump Tower flooded, we might start going to synagogue every week.
And once again, Mayor Eric Adams appears to have been caught unprepared. Which is understandable because, by golly, who can possibly expect the National Weather Service to forecast torrential rain 24 hours ahead of time, besides everyone:
This is not the first time in recent memory that New York City was at risk from a combination of way too much rain in way too short a period of time stressing its way too old storm drains and infrastructure. It happened just last Christmas. And last September. And last July. And relatively regularly for at least the last decade or so.
Given all this, plus the fact that he was harshly criticized for having been out of the city when storms swamped New York last Christmas, one could reasonably expect Eric Adams to have been more on top of this latest round of potential catastrophe.
But no, not really. Adams’s office sent out a “travel advisory” at 11 p.m. on Thursday night, which really tells the public nothing other than that there is going to be heavy rain and they should maybe possibly consider allowing more time for their commute. Then he held a press conference at 11 a.m. on Friday, after the rain had been falling for several hours and the Brooklyn Queens Expressway could only be navigated by kayak.
Had Adams spoken sooner with some urgency, perhaps some of this mess could have been mitigated. At a minimum, maybe more people would have known this was coming and would have stayed home and not tried to drive through several feet of water, which is something drivers should really not attempt. But he was busy on Thursday night holding a fundraiser to celebrate his birthday (which was a month ago).
For crying out loud, NYC doesn’t seem to have a problem shutting down when there is a blizzard bearing down on it. So this is very simple: Eric Adams needs to tell his administration that preparing for 5 to 6 inches of rain isn’t much different than preparing for 5 to 6 inches of snow. You just send out the boats instead of the snowplows.
On the plus side, Adams’s increased police budget means the NYPD could have theoretically beefed up its swift water rescue team by now! Otherwise what else did he cut the library budget for?
We doubt the 400-pound robot that Adams recently unveiled to patrol the Times Square subway station was much use if any civilians got trapped and needed rescuing, however.
Adams does in fact have a plan to make New York more environmentally sustainable, and he’ll likely point to it when asked about how he’s preparing the city for the regular flooding that seems to be connected to climate change. (Yes wingnuts, warmer air globally means more intense rainstorms locally.)
Clearly, though, the city needs some much more aggressive flood mitigation measures on a much more aggressive timeline. Otherwise no one will rent any of its thousands of basement apartments ever again, what with the risk of drowning in them and all.
[NY Times]
