New York
The Disaster to Come: New York’s Next Superstorm
This is what rain can do in New York City.
In July, Jessica Louise Dye was on the subway when she recorded a video of a “cascading wall of water coming at us.” Scenes like these are becoming more and more common. They also hint at what’s to come.
The next hurricane could inundate the city in a far worse way than Superstorm Sandy in 2012, according to new projections. Much of that increase has to do with extreme rain.
The largest city in the country is mostly a cluster of islands. Its inlets and rivers rise and fall with the tides.
Sandy produced a deadly storm surge, and in 2021, the remnants of Hurricane Ida introduced the damage of extreme rainfall. The next hurricane could bring both.
It would not have to be a major one. A weaker hurricane, dumping sheets of rain and moving in a northwest direction from the ocean, would wreak havoc, experts said.
First Street, a climate risk group in Manhattan, created a model of the damage a storm on such a track could have. In this example, a Category 1 hurricane would make landfall in New Jersey at high tide like Sandy, amid rainfall of four inches per hour — one of the more extreme scenarios.
The results showed a 16-foot storm surge, two feet higher than Sandy’s, which when combined with a torrential downpour, could put 25 percent of the city under water.
Today, such a storm is not impossible. It could happen about once every century, said Jeremy Porter, who leads the group’s climate implications research. “But it will become more normal with the changing climate,” Dr. Porter said.
Some of Manhattan’s most iconic spots would be submerged. Downtown, that would include parts of Chinatown, SoHo and the financial district.
In the Bronx, Yankee Stadium would be nearly surrounded by water, up to 11 feet in places.
Highways that hug Manhattan would see up to 10 feet of flooding, while farther north, a part of the Cross Bronx Expressway that dips before an underpass could be submerged up to 47 feet.
But Manhattan and the Bronx would largely fare better than the boroughs that border the ocean. Brooklyn, Staten Island and Queens, with miles of low-lying neighborhoods and dire drainage problems, would bear the brunt – over 80 percent – of the flooding.
Property damage across the city could exceed $20 billion, twice as much as Sandy caused, according to First Street.
Here are some of the neighborhoods, starting inland and moving toward the coast, that would see the worst of the destruction.
Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, could see as much as 11 feet of stormwater.
A large hilly ridge cuts through the middle of Staten Island, Brooklyn and Queens. Its natural elevation provides some of the city’s most spectacular views.
Bedford-Stuyvesant, in Central Brooklyn and north of the moraine, could see as much as 11 feet of stormwater, including along tree-lined streets with brownstones worth millions. Ground-floor apartments that can rent for as much as $4,000 would fill up like cisterns.
South of the moraine, East Flatbush could see nearly eight feet of water.
Four years ago, rains from Ida flooded the streets here.
“Water was gushing in from everywhere,” said Renée Phillips, 62, a 50-year resident. “That storm was something I’d never seen in my lifetime,” Ms. Phillips said. “And I hope and I pray that I never see it again.”
This October, Ms. Phillips’s street flooded again. Her 39-year-old neighbor drowned in his basement apartment. Ms. Phillips outside her home. Though she rents out apartments on the first floor, maintaining them is difficult because of water damage.
Based on First Street estimates, her house could face up to six feet of flooding in the next storm.
After Ida, Ms. Phillips escaped by wading through her flooded street while carrying two dogs and a cat. Her waterlogged property grew mold and the first floor had to be gutted.
She did not have flood insurance because she did not live in a designated flood zone. Ms. Phillips took out a loan for $89,000 to replace her boiler and fix the first floor. She was just beginning to consider repairs on the rest of her property when the deluge this fall set her back again. The boiler she had installed after Ida was destroyed, leaving her without heat.
“I’m distraught,” said Ms. Phillips, who was grieving her next door neighbor, and panicked about her finances.
“I feel like I have no control over the situation,” she said.
Kissena Park, a residential neighborhood in East Flushing, Queens, could get over 19 feet of storm water.
Ida flooded basement and first-floor homes here, killing three people.
Three years later, in 2024, at a community meeting, Rohit Aggarwala, the city’s climate chief and the commissioner of the Department of Environmental Protection, explained the reasons to residents.
“The area is a bowl,” he said. Kissena Park also was built over waterways and wetlands, he added.
But there was a third factor, Mr. Aggarwala said: A major sewer artery was there, responsible for 20 percent of storm and wastewater in Queens. When the sewer got overwhelmed, it created a bottleneck in Kissena Park.
All of these forces were at work during Ida.
Michael Ferraro, 32, who works in information technology, was returning from moving his car to higher ground, when he discovered that his street had turned into a raging river.
“I tried to swim, but the currents were taking me down,” he said, explaining that grabbing onto a fence saved his life.
Michael Ferraro’s home was inundated during Ida. His neighborhood flooded again this fall.
Based on First Street estimates, his house could be completely submerged during the future storm they projected.
Upsizing the sewer for Kissena Park would cost billions and take decades, according to the city’s Department of Environmental Protection.
Hamilton Beach, just west of Kennedy Airport, was built over coastal wetlands. The neighborhood could see up to nine feet of flooding.
Southeast Queens was once mostly salt marsh, which provided crucial protection against flooding. But over the years, city leaders filled the marshes in to build neighborhoods, highways and Kennedy Airport.
The water frequently returns.
In Hamilton Beach, when the tide is higher than usual, water pours into the neighborhood from a nearby basin and up through the sewers.
This August, on a clear evening, it flooded again. Some residents moved their cars to higher ground. Others, walking home from work, borrowed plastic bags from neighbors to wrap around their shoes. Sump pumps wheezed, and garbage bags floated through the streets.
Roger Gendron, 63, a retired truck driver and neighborhood flood-watch leader, took it in from his second-floor porch. “A storm that is hundreds of miles off the coast is doing this,” he said. “Just imagine what a direct hit would do.”
In August, tidal flooding, a regular occurrence in Hamilton Beach, forced residents to roll up their pants and move their cars.
Roger Gendron at his house in Hamilton Beach. Water could rise to his second-floor porch in a storm, according to First Street projections.
Hamilton Beach and other areas surrounding Jamaica Bay, the largest wetland in New York City, are prone to compound flooding, when heavy rain and coastal flooding combine.
The Department of Environmental Protection, which oversees the city’s water systems, has a 50-year plan to build out such a network. It is 10 years in and has spent over $1.5 billion so far. The work includes a major sewer expansion north of Kennedy Airport.
“If the airport were still a wetland, we wouldn’t have to build a gigantic sewer under the highway,” said Mr. Aggarwala, the head of the department, on a recent tour of the work site.
In 40 years, once the entire system for southeast Queens is complete, the pipes here and in other parts of the network will be able to transport over one billion gallons of storm water to the bay.
And this is just one corner of the city. It will take at least 30 years and about $30 billion to improve the parts of the sewer system that are the most vulnerable to storm water, Mr. Aggarwala said.
Throughout New York, city leaders are reckoning with decisions that were made some 100 years ago to build infrastructure on wetlands.
“The work is endless,” said Jamie Torres-Springer, president of construction and development for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, during a recent tour of a subway yard.
The 30-acre subway yard in the eastern Bronx — the city’s third largest — was built over a salt marsh, where a tidal creek used to flow. Of the transit system’s 24 subway yards, which maintain and store thousands of train cars, 13 are vulnerable to storm surge.
The city’s two biggest yards now have flood walls, drainage improvements and other protections. Work on the eastern Bronx yard is scheduled for next year.
In Brooklyn, Coney Island would be under up to six feet of water, with bridges and roads washed out.
Sandy devastated the Brooklyn peninsula.
“We’re afraid every day that it’s going to happen again,” said Pamela Pettyjohn. During the superstorm, a sinkhole opened under her home.
She and other residents are concerned that the new developments, some of which include higher sidewalks and elevated bases that encourage water to flow under, around or through them, could worsen flooding in lower-lying areas, while taxing an already-overburdened sewer system.
And, with few ways on and off the peninsula, the addition of thousands of residents here could make a hurricane evacuation even more perilous.
Pamela Pettyjohn placed a flood barrier outside her home before a storm this summer.
Her house could face nearly six feet of flooding.
After Sandy, Ms. Pettyjohn, a retiree, spent her savings rebuilding her home. She is living without heat because salt water from the storm slowly rusted out her boiler. The soaring cost of flood insurance keeps her from buying a new one, she said.
During Sandy, many bungalows in Midland Beach flooded, and they have since been repaired and put up for sale. Some are so inexpensive that New Yorkers can own them outright. Two neighboring bungalows, for example, are on sale as a package deal for $325,000, in a city where the median price for one home is about $800,000.
Without a mortgage, though, there is no mandate to buy flood insurance. Some homeowners could lose everything in the next hurricane.
“People are still deniers here,” Mr. Tirone said. They will continue to snatch up real estate deals in flood zones, he continued, until the government dictates to them otherwise.
He added: “The question is, ‘What’s that going to take?’ ”
Methodology
The 3-D base map in this article uses Google’s Photorealistic 3D Tiles, which draw from the following sources to create the tiles: Google; Data SIO; National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration; U.S. Navy; National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency; General Bathymetric Chart of the Oceans; Landsat / Copernicus; International Bathymetric Chart of the Arctic Ocean; Vexcel Imaging US, Inc.
Times journalists consulted the following experts: Phil Klotzbach, Colorado State University; Paul Gallay, Klaus Jacob, Jacqueline Klopp and Adam Sobel, Columbia University; Franco Montalto, Drexel University; Amal Elawady, Florida International University; Ali Sarhadi, Georgia Institute of Technology; Kerry Emanuel, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Lucy Royte and Eric W. Sanderson, New York Botanical Garden; Zachary Iscol, New York City Emergency Management; Andrea Silverman, New York University; Fran Fuselli, Northwest Bronx Community and Clergy Coalition; Bernice Rosenzweig, Sarah Lawrence College; Brett Branco and Deborah Alves, Science and Resilience Institute at Jamaica Bay, Brooklyn College; Philip Orton, Stevens Institute of Technology; Jorge González-Cruz, University at Albany, SUNY; Stephen Pekar and Kara Murphy Schlichting, Queens College, CUNY; Tyler Taba, Waterfront Alliance.
A 76-year-old man died on Friday after being shoved down the stairs at the 18th Street subway station in Manhattan, and the police arrested a suspect who had been arrested multiple times in recent months and had been discharged from Bellevue Hospital’s psychiatric ward just hours before.
The victim, Ross Falzone, landed on his head at the bottom of the stairs and suffered a traumatic brain injury, a fractured spine and a fractured rib after a stranger rushed forward and pushed him, the police said.
Mr. Falzone had been walking north on Seventh Avenue toward the subway station in the Chelsea neighborhood on Thursday evening, said Brad Weekes, assistant commissioner of public information for the Police Department. Walking about 30 yards behind him was the stranger, according to surveillance footage from the scene, Mr. Weekes said. As Mr. Falzone reached the station, the man rushed forward and pushed him down the stairs. He was taken to Bellevue where he died shortly before 3 a.m. on Friday.
The death sparked outrage at City Hall. Mayor Zohran Mamdani quickly called for an investigation into how Bellevue handled the discharge of the suspect and suggested that institutional problems at the hospital might have led to the random attack.
“I am horrified by the killing of Ross Falzone and the circumstances that led to it,” Mr. Mamdani said in a news release on Friday, in which he ordered “an immediate investigation on what steps should have been taken to prevent this tragedy.”
Police identified the suspect as Rhamell Burke, 32.
In the three months preceding the attack, Mr. Burke was arrested four times, Mr. Weekes said, including an arrest on Feb. 2 in connection with an assault on a Port Authority police officer.
Mr. Burke’s most recent interaction with the police began at around 3:30 p.m. Thursday, when he approached a group of N.Y.P.D. officers outside the 17th Precinct station house on East 51st Street, Mr. Weekes said. He grabbed a stick from a pile of garbage on the street and approached the officers, who told him to drop the stick. When he did, officers placed Mr. Burke in a police vehicle and drove him to Bellevue, where he was admitted to the emergency room at around 3:40 p.m., Mr. Weekes said. Mr. Burke was taken to the hospital’s Comprehensive Psychiatric Emergency Program for evaluation and treatment, Mr. Weekes said, and was released from the hospital one hour later.
He was just a mile and a half from the hospital when he encountered Mr. Falzone at around 9:30 p.m. Thursday.
On Friday afternoon, police officers found Mr. Burke in Penn Station, where they arrested him. He was in custody on Friday evening. It was unclear Friday if Mr. Burke had a lawyer.
The mayor said he had requested help from the New York State Department of Health, which will investigate the decision to release Mr. Burke from Bellevue and conduct a review of similar cases at the hospital. The state agency also will investigate psychiatric evaluation and discharge procedures across NYC Health and Hospitals, the city’s public hospital system, according to the news release.
Mr. Falzone was a retired high school teacher who lived alone for many years in an apartment building on the Upper West Side. His friends were in shock on Friday about his death. They shared memories of an affable but private man who rarely spoke about his family or personal life.
Mr. Falzone had been recovering from a recent surgery and seemed more mobile and happy, said Marc Stager, 78, Mr. Falzone’s next-door neighbor on a tree-lined block of West 85th Street. He was known as a cheerful “yapper,” said Briel Waxman, a neighbor. He was the kind of New Yorker who enjoyed chatting with neighbors about historical details of his building and seeing performances at Lincoln Center with friends.
“He was always out and about,” said Ms. Waxman, 35, who often returned to her apartment at midnight or 1 a.m. to find Mr. Falzone arriving home at the same time. “I was like, ‘I don’t know if I’m proud of you or embarrassed of myself,’” she remembered telling him.
Mr. Falzone had wide taste in music — opera, classical, jazz, pop — and neighbors could tell he was home when they heard notes escaping from under his apartment door, Mr. Stager said.
He was “a helpless old guy,” said Mr. Stager, who added that he was “disappointed and shocked, frankly, that somebody could do such a thing” as shove such a defenseless person down the stairs.
When Ms. Waxman moved into the building five years ago, Mr. Falzone was among the first people to welcome her, she said. He once brought a package to her door that had been delivered to the wrong unit and shared that what is now a blank wall in her apartment had once been a fireplace.
Ms. Waxman sat in her living room on Friday and cried as she talked, dabbing her eyes with a tissue. She remembered Mr. Falzone as “just overall, nice, talkative, genuine human.”
A suicide note purported to be written by the sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein while he was in jail in 2019 uses language that in some cases echoes his past writings to friends and family.
One phrase found in the apparent suicide note — “No Fun” — also appears on a handwritten page found in Mr. Epstein’s jail cell at the time of his death, as well as in emails he sent over the years.
And another saying in the suicide note — “watcha want me to do — bust out cryin!!” — appears in emails that Mr. Epstein had written to people close to him.
A cellmate claimed that Mr. Epstein left the suicide note before he was found unresponsive in their cell weeks before his death. The New York Times reported on the note last week and successfully asked a federal judge to unseal it.
If authentic, the note gives a view into Mr. Epstein’s mind-set before he was found dead at age 66 in August 2019. The New York City medical examiner ruled his death a suicide.
‘NO FUN’
A different handwritten note was found in Mr. Epstein’s cell when he died, and investigators believed it was written by him. In that document, Mr. Epstein complained about jail conditions — burned food, giant bugs and being kept in a locked shower. He concluded it with the underlined phrase, “NO FUN!!”
Mr. Epstein also used the phrase in emails when describing things he was unhappy about, or situations that had not gone his way.
‘watcha want me to do — bust out cryin’
Mr. Epstein used the phrase “watcha want me to do — bust out cryin” with friends, and in messages to his brother, Mark Epstein.
Like the note released by the judge, Mr. Epstein’s emails were often short, with staccato phrases and erratic punctuation. The emails were contained in millions of pages of documents the Justice Department released in response to a law passed last year requiring disclosure of records pertaining to Mr. Epstein.
It has become an article of faith in the New York State Capitol that when Gov. Kathy Hochul enters the Red Room on the building’s second floor to announce a budget agreement, the deal is actually far from sealed.
This year was no different.
Despite declaring that “today is the day” to announce an agreement on a $268 billion state budget, Ms. Hochul on Thursday acknowledged that several key initiatives — including a new tax surcharge on multimillion-dollar second homes in New York City — had been agreed on in principle, but that the details still needed work.
Even the top-line figure had not been finalized.
Lawmakers are fond of saying that the devil is in the details. But in the absence of the lengthy budget bills that include those details, which have yet to be printed and voted on, a host of unanswered questions remain.
Here are five of them:
Why did Hochul announce a deal when one hadn’t really been made yet?
New York’s opaque budget process, which starts in January with the State of the State address and is supposed to be completed by April 1, has become far more than a negotiation over a fiscal document.
Governors have tended to use the budget to wedge in legislative priorities, wielding their leverage over billions of dollars to get their way.
Ms. Hochul has embraced this practice. And, in a re-election year, she wanted to convey to voters that she intended to stand up to President Trump’s immigration crackdown, help out New York City and lower costs for everyday New Yorkers.
She made that case on Thursday at a news conference flanked by several of her top aides. Notably missing were the leaders of the State Assembly and Senate.
When will the budget actually be passed?
Not this week. The Assembly speaker, Carl E. Heastie, said on Thursday that it was “very premature” of the governor to say a deal had been reached. He would not even say that the Legislature had agreed to the $268 billion figure.
He complained about Ms. Hochul’s penchant for jamming nonfiscal policies into the budget and said he would not discuss such matters with his members until he had a better sense of the total amount the state would be spending.
As he spoke, members of the Senate and Assembly, who are currently not being paid, were wrapping up their legislative business for the week in a rush to return to their districts. They will be back in Albany on Monday; it is unclear what bill language, if any, will have been printed and distributed by then.
Did Zohran Mamdani get what he wanted?
Mr. Mamdani, the mayor of New York City, campaigned on wresting more than $10 billion in tax increases from the state to pay for his ambitious agenda. That will not happen this year.
Ms. Hochul did accede to a new tax on second homes that targets the city’s richest property owners whose primary residences are outside New York City. The goal is to raise $500 million each year, which will go toward closing the city’s estimated $5.4 billion budget deficit.
But she spurned the mayor’s request to make changes to a tax credit called the Pass Through Entity Tax that is used by some business owners. Mr. Mamdani had said that the measure, which was also backed by the City Council speaker, Julie Menin, could raise up to $1 billion a year in tax revenue.
Aside from tax increases, Mr. Mamdani’s overarching priority has been expanding child care in the city. Ms. Hochul’s budget does just that, with $4.5 billion allotted for child care and prekindergarten programs across the state.
It’s not the whole loaf, or even half. But Mr. Mamdani can point to that funding and say that he is advancing toward his goal of providing free child care for every New York City child under 5. And while the governor rejected his efforts to fund a program to make buses free, she directed more than $1 billion in additional aid to the city that, combined with revenue from the second-home tax and other proposed measures like delays in pension payments, could help Mr. Mamdani work to close its budget gap.
How will the tax on pieds-à-terre work?
State lawmakers — and just about everyone else — are scratching their heads about the details of this tax surcharge, which Ms. Hochul proposed with great fanfare last month. The New York Times previously reported that one proposal being discussed would apply one tax rate to pieds-à-terre with values between $5 million and $15 million; a higher rate for ones valued between $15 million and $25 million; and an even higher rate for properties valued at $25 million or more, according to three people familiar with the matter.
How much the property owners would pay is still up in the air. Ms. Hochul said on Thursday that more details would be coming in the near future and that the tax would apply to units worth $5 million or more.
Also being sorted out is how, exactly, the value of each co-op or apartment would be determined.
“It’s going to take some time to get to the right number to assess that,” the governor said, noting the city’s complex system for calculating a property’s assessed value.
“We’re looking at the difference between what is currently assessed but what is market value,” she added. “We’re working it out with the city. We have had some really good conversations.”
How will pensions change for state workers?
Facing pressure from the state’s largest public unions, Ms. Hochul has been trying to determine how to restore certain pension benefits that had been cut for public employees hired after 2012.
Any changes could end up costing the state hundreds of millions of dollars, while also saddling local municipalities and school districts with increased spending burdens. Several of the labor groups have prioritized lowering the minimum retirement age to 55 from 63.
Ms. Hochul said on Thursday that the particulars were still being negotiated, but stressed that the cost to the state and local governments would be less than the $1.5 billion that has been requested by the unions.
“We are willing to look at this and make changes, but a much more scaled-back monetary proposal,” she said.
“We will release these numbers as soon as it’s absolutely done,” she added.
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