N.Y. toll hits 15 as gov aims to prevent repeat

Gov. Hochul said Friday that Tropical Storm Ida’s devastating downpours led to at least 15 deaths in New York and unleashed more than $30 million in property damage, and she vowed to review possible holes in the state’s response to the deluge.

Surveying storm-scarred Yonkers, the governor expressed concern that a repeat of the storm could “literally happen next week,” and promised to convene “a task force that will do an after-action report” so the state can better prepare for the next onslaught.

The remnants of Ida, which battered the region with unprecedented ferocity on Wednesday night, quickly turned parts of the New York City subway system into subterranean rivers and basement homes into watery death traps.

A 14-month-old boy and an 86-year-old woman perished, the city’s transit system came to a halt and political leaders conceded that they were caught off guard by a monsoon that dumped a month’s worth of rain on the city in hours.

It was the second record-setting round of precipitation to hit New York City at the end of a sizzling summer, and officials have stressed that climate change seems to be creating a new normal in the Big Apple.

“Some people will call this a 500-year event,” Hochul told reporters in Yonkers. “I don’t buy that.”

She said she wants an accounting of what the state did well and poorly in handling Ida, and she called for upgrades to the drainage system around the city’s subway.

The governor, who hails from the Buffalo area — where massive snowstorms are a fact of life — said she wishes to never again see “Niagara Falls rushing down the stairs in one of the New York City subways.”

“I can’t prevent it right now,” she said. “But I know we have to take action.”

Heroic first responders helped rescue more than 800 subway riders on the 4, 6, R, N and E lines during the watery tempest.

Appearing in Staten Island on Friday afternoon, Hochul said she wants an immediate survey of the state-controlled Metropolitan Transportation Authority. She said she had planned conversations about subway protection for later in the day.

The governor also noted that she wants the subway sealed off in future emergency situations.

“When there’s a snow event, you block people from going on the New York State Thruway,” she said. “To me that’s just very logical: Don’t let anybody else enter the subways until we can let everybody know there’s a danger out there and clear out the people.”

Hochul, a Democrat, consulted with President Biden in the aftermath of the storm, and she plugged his bipartisan infrastructure bill as she compared the historic torrents of rain to ocean flooding from storms like Superstorm Sandy.

“This is different than wave action — this is coming from the heavens,” she told reporters in muddy Yonkers. “It’s coming down, and it’s coming down in unprecedented amounts. And that’s what we have to be ready for. So that takes partnership with the federal government, getting the infrastructure bill through.”

The president pushed his $1 trillion infrastructure legislation in a speech from Washington on Thursday. The bill made it through the Senate last month, and House Democrats hope to pass the legislation by October.

“We’re reminded that this isn’t about politics,” Biden said in his Thursday address, pledging support for hard-hit areas from Louisiana to the Northeast. “Hurricane Ida didn’t care if you were a Democrat or Republican, rural or urban. Its destruction is everywhere, and it’s a matter of life and death.”

The president also approved an emergency disaster declaration for 14 New York counties crushed by the storm, a move that released federal funds. On Friday, some 8,000 New Yorkers were estimated to still lack electricity.

In the short term, Hochul said she wants to improve systems of communication for emergency situations like Ida. She questioned whether alerts came in languages beyond English and whether they reached all at-risk citizens.

“We have to get a better system for evacuations, and deploy people on the ground in these events, and not hope that they got a message,” the governor said. “We have a vulnerable population that has surfaced through this, when you saw so many people dying literally in their own homes.”