New York
Why Did New York’s Streets Seem Extra Salty This Winter?
The last snowfall in New York City is fading from memory. It didn’t amount to much — less than half an inch — and didn’t stick around for long.
What did linger was the 28 million pounds of salt that was dumped on the streets that day, causing some people to speculate that there was more salt being spread than usual.
Caroline Ourso, a photographer from the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, recalled being hit in the face with windblown salt as she walked on the Upper East Side. “It was gross,” she said.
“You’re over-salting!” said Cindy Sbiel, who lives in the Williamsburg area of Brooklyn, adding: “The snow is not coming yet! Just chill. When the snow comes, then put down salt.”
Ms. Sbiel, 30, said that this winter she had felt that street salt was everywhere — in her 6-year-old daughter’s shoes, inside her first-floor home, in her wig.
Ms. Sbiel’s friend, Lily Roth, said she’d noticed the clothes of her 8-year-old and 5-year-old children sprouting splotches of white.
“I see the salt on their coats, stained,” Ms. Roth said. “And all over their shoes — it has damaged their shoes.”
Despite the splotching and the glazing, the city says it has not changed its approach to salting in recent years. The impression that it has might come from a newish method of preparing the city’s streets for snowfall and a shortage of precipitation to wash the salt away.
What is true is that the salty residue has played havoc with thousands of miles of electrical cables buried beneath the pavement, causing dramatic scenes sometimes caught on video:
Smoke and flames shoot out of manholes as the briny runoff causes short circuits that briefly knock out power in pockets of the city.
“Snow doesn’t cause the problems,” said Patrick McHugh, an executive at the Consolidated Edison utility. “It’s the salting effect and how much the city salts,” he said, describing what happens to the company’s cables when rock salt eats through their outer layers, freeing electrons to run wild underground.
For as long as a week after the salt washes off the pavement, Con Edison crews, working 12-hour shifts, must contend with a surge in the number of cables they have to repair or replace, Mr. McHugh said. The tally of those “jobs” can run to several hundred, compared with 25 to 50 in a typical week, he said.
In one example, an electrical cable caught fire beneath the street near Prospect Park in Brooklyn on Feb. 21, sending flames bursting through a crosswalk. Power was out for most of the day for some residents of the area while Con Edison replaced the damaged cables, a company spokesman said.
That happened a day after the city received a light snowfall and the Department of Sanitation spread those 28 million pounds (or 14,000 tons) of rock salt to melt it.
Before the flakes started to fall, the department sent out its fleet of trucks that spread brine — salt mixed with water — on the pavement.
Brining the streets — that’s the official terminology — is a relatively new practice in the city. A few years ago, the Sanitation Department started pouring the mixture onto the busiest streets if they were dry in the hours before snow was forecast, said Joshua Goodman, a spokesman for the department. Once the flakes start to fly, the city begins to lay down dry salt.
The brine causes snow to melt as soon as it lands, Mr. Goodman said. It also remains on the pavement, visible as a white sheen, until snow or rain washes it off, he said. But if there are no flakes or drops, the brine sticks around.
The department did not apply brine in anticipation of a Jan. 22 snowfall because the brine it had applied the previous week had not washed away, he said.
This year, the snowfalls have been more frequent but not too impressive. The Sanitation Department has recorded 13 “snow events” this winter, but barely more than a foot of snow in all, Mr. Goodman said.
“All these small snowstorms are the situationship that just won’t leave us alone,” the department posted on social media on Valentine’s Day, adding an eye-roll emoji.
The department announced that it would be brining streets and bike lanes that day and would be ready to roll out its fleet of salt spreaders if the snow forecast for the next day materialized. About a half-inch fell on Central Park on Feb. 15, but it disappeared quickly, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
The city started the winter with about 350,000 tons of salt on hand, Mr. Goodman said. Its spreaders distribute 10,000 tons — about the weight of the Eiffel Tower — in one pass over the streets, he said. But often, more than one pass is necessary.
If at least two inches of snow falls, the department sends out heavy trucks with plows attached to their front ends. They follow prescribed routes that cover 19,000 miles, one lane at a time, he said.
The department lays salt on virtually all of the streets, avenues and highways in the city, with a few exceptions, Mr. Goodman said. One notable “no-salt zone” is a stretch of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway that is considered especially vulnerable to the corrosion that salt can cause, he said.
Last winter, the department spread salt five times, using a minimum of about 23,500 tons on Jan. 6 and a maximum of almost 50,000 tons on Jan. 17, according to statistics compiled on the city’s Open Data website. But the volumes varied by borough, with Queens getting the most in early January and Brooklyn getting the most in mid-January.
“We look at the forecasts and say, these neighborhoods are going to get more than those neighborhoods,” Mr. Goodman said. “The use of the salt is much more surgical now than it’s ever been.”
Aria Woodley, 37, said she has had to carry her 8-pound dog, Runi, in her arms during walks because the salt on the ground and in the air was so thick this winter.
“I understand it’s a necessary evil, and that the salt needs to be down before it snows,” she said. “But how often are the weather people right?”
Nate Schweber contributed reporting.
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 driver who crashed into a woman and her two young daughters while they were crossing a street in Brooklyn in March, killing all three, was sentenced to as many as nine years in prison on Wednesday.
The driver, Miriam Yarimi, has admitted striking the woman, Natasha Saada, 34, and her daughters, Diana, 8, and Deborah, 5, after speeding through a red light. She had slammed into another vehicle on the border of the Gravesend and Midwood neighborhoods and careened into a crosswalk where the family was walking.
Ms. Yarimi, 33, accepted a judge’s offer last month to admit to three counts of second-degree manslaughter in Brooklyn Supreme Court in return for a lighter sentence. She was sentenced on Wednesday by the judge, Justice Danny Chun, to three to nine years behind bars.
The case against Ms. Yarimi, a wig maker with a robust social media presence, became a flashpoint among transportation activists. Ms. Yarimi, who drove a blue Audi A3 sedan with the license plate WIGM8KER, had a long history of driving infractions, according to New York City records, with more than $12,000 in traffic violation fines tied to her vehicle at the time of the crash.
The deaths of Ms. Saada and her daughters set off a wave of outrage in the city over unchecked reckless driving and prompted calls from transportation groups for lawmakers to pass penalties on so-called super speeders.
Ms. Yarimi “cared about only herself when she raced in the streets of Brooklyn and wiped away nearly an entire family,” Eric Gonzalez, the Brooklyn district attorney, said in a statement after the sentencing. “She should not have been driving a car that day.”
Mr. Gonzalez had recommended the maximum sentence of five to 15 years in prison.
On Wednesday, Ms. Yarimi appeared inside the Brooklyn courtroom wearing a gray shirt and leggings, with her hands handcuffed behind her back. During the brief proceedings, she addressed the court, reading from a piece of paper.
“I’ll have to deal with this for the rest of my life and I think that’s a punishment in itself,” she said, her eyes full of tears. “I think about the victims every day. There’s not a day that goes by where I don’t think about what I’ve done.”
On the afternoon of March 29, a Saturday, Ms. Yarimi was driving with a suspended license, according to prosecutors. Around 1 p.m., she turned onto Ocean Parkway, where surveillance video shows her using her cellphone and running a red light, before continuing north, they said.
At the intersection with Quentin Road, Ms. Saada was stepping into the crosswalk with her two daughters and 4-year-old son. Nearby, a Toyota Camry was waiting to turn onto the parkway.
Ms. Yarimi sped through a red light and into the intersection. She barreled into the back of the Toyota and then shot forward, plowing into the Saada family. Her car flipped over and came to a rest about 130 feet from the carnage.
Ms. Saada and her daughters were killed, while her son was taken to a hospital where he had a kidney removed and was treated for skull fractures and brain bleeding. The Toyota’s five passengers — an Uber driver, a mother and her three children — also suffered minor injuries.
Ms. Yarimi’s car had been traveling 68 miles per hour in a 25 m.p.h. zone and showed no sign that brakes had been applied, prosecutors said. Ms. Yarimi sustained minor injures from the crash and was later taken to a hospital for psychiatric evaluation.
The episode caused immediate fury, drawing reactions from Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch and Mayor Eric Adams, who attended the Saadas’s funeral.
According to NYCServ, the city’s database for unpaid tickets, Ms. Yarimi’s Audi had $1,345 in unpaid fines at the time of the crash. On another website that tracks traffic violations using city data, the car received 107 parking and camera violations between June 2023 and the end of March 2025. Those violations, which included running red lights and speeding through school zones, amounted to more than $12,000 in fines.
In the months that followed, transportation safety groups and activists decried Ms. Yarimi’s traffic record and urged lawmakers in Albany to pass legislation to address the city’s chronic speeders.
Mr. Gonzalez on Wednesday said that Ms. Yarimi’s sentence showed “that reckless driving will be vigorously prosecuted.”
But outside the courthouse, the Saada family’s civil lawyer, Herschel Kulefsky, complained that the family had not been allowed to speak in court. “ They are quite disappointed, or outraged would probably be a better word,” he said, calling the sentence “the bare minimum.”
“I think this doesn’t send any message at all, other than a lenient message,” Mr. Kulefsky added.
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