Why New York City was caught off guard by flash flooding
[...]
The intense rainfall marked the most rain in a single day at New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport, which saw nearly 8 inches of rain in one day, more "than any other since 1948," per . Brooklyn was hit with about a month's worth of rain in three hours "as it was socked by some of the storm’s most intense rainfall rates," the outlet added. The extreme precipitation prompted New York Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) to declare a state of emergency, calling the rainfall "a life-threatening event,” per . While some have positioned the storm as a real-time example of climate change, others feel strongly that human error and interaction also played a direct role in the magnitude of the damage.
[...]
New York City's infrastructure was built for weather patterns of the past, and those designs did not account for the recent extreme rainfall and flash flooding caused by Hurricane Irene, Hurricane Sandy, or, more recently, Hurricane Ida. “We now have in New York something much more like a tropical-rainfall pattern,” Rohit Aggarwala, New York City’s environmental protection commissioner, said at hours before the storm hit. When designing infrastructure, “you always build to the record,” Aggarwala noted, but that becomes complicated when climate change creates conditions that break those records.
[...]
The big takeaway from the city's sudden deluge is that "our infrastructure was designed for a climate that no longer exists," University of Michigan climate scientist Mohammed Ombadi told . Recent floods have made that point "very clear," as we continue to "hear news of washed-out roadways and bridges, damaged tracks in railroads, and swamped homes," Ombadi added. "We need to change the way we design and build infrastructure to be in line with the increase in rainfall extreme events predicted by climate scientists."
[...]
The nationwide trend of unexpected flooding is due in part to "the role the human-built environment plays in exacerbating and sometimes entirely creating these flooding events," Samuel Brody, professor and director of the Institute for a Disaster Resilient Texas, told . That's what is "playing out in New York City today." Cities need to monitor and update their drainage systems over time. "Historically, in the United States, we’ve done a very bad job of that." Brody also challenged the notion that climate change is advancing too quickly, arguing that "a much quicker, more powerful vector of risk" is that "human development is changing much more quickly than our drainage systems and our infrastructure can accommodate — much more quickly than climate change."
[...]