Tragic losses, lucky escapes
Victims take stock after ravages of Ida
The difference between life and death in a Queens neighborhood was one floor.
The deadly downpour that killed three East Flushing residents trapped in a flooded basement spared two neighbors who lived on the first floor of another home, with the survivors offering thanks Friday for their good fortune after Tropical Storm Ida left 13 New Yorkers dead in its devastating wake..
“I thought, ‘I’m gonna die here, but I don’t want to die here,’” recalled Celso Escobar, 37, who needed the help of two other men to force his front door open against the surging waters. “I tried very hard ... I pushed so hard.”
Escobar escaped with his wife, their two kids and his mother-in-law, although their rented home is ruined: Caked in mud, refrigerator broken, a water line six feet high on the apartment wall.
Police were still trying Friday to identify five people killed in the storm as New Yorkers dried out and cleaned up following the torrential rain and whipping winds that wreaked lingering havoc across the five boroughs starting Wednesday night.
The damage in East Flushing was almost incalculable, with nearly every parked car totaled, a stench of mold heavy in the air, ruined mattresses and clothes tossed to the curb.
But Sophy Liu, 36, was happy to take in the view after her heroic landlord and a gutsy pal rescued her from a flooded first-floor apartment.
Trapped inside her home, she called a friend who lived nearby — and he swam through the floodwaters to reach her. The hammer-wielding landlord met the friend outside Liu’s door, where the pair managed to smash their way through to save the woman and her 10-year-old son.
“I may have died,” she reflected Friday while mopping up water. “Of course I’m lucky that I’m alive, and then unlucky when I clean up. I almost passed out.”
Eleven of the fatalities occurred in six incidents in Queens, while two victims died in separate incidents in Brooklyn. The dead included an autistic 14-monthold boy and an 86-year-old woman, two of 10 victims killed inside basement spaces illegally converted into apartments, the Department of Buildings said Friday.
“It’s not supposed to be rented out,” said the son of a 60-year-old man who survived the East Flushing nightmare. “But it’s cheap. Especially for new immigrants who don’t speak English.”
The unidentified included two women and a man found dead in a flooded basement on Peck Ave. in East Flushing, a man burned to death inside a car on the Grand Central Parkway, and a second man found floating off Sunset Park. All five deaths were believed to be storm-related, an NYPD spokesman said, and the victim found in the water was a 40-year-old man believed to be homeless.
The victim inside the car apparently died when his vehicle caught fire during the storm. The car wasn’t discovered until the next morning when another car plowed into it, a police source said.
The numbers illustrated the terrifying situation as the relentless rain battered the city: 69 water rescues, including 28 on Staten Island. An additional 25 families were relocated from their water-damaged homes, and 496 vehicles abandoned by their owners on city roads, officials said.
In a stretch near the Queens site of the U.S. Open, police reported numerous people trapped in their cars by the fast-rising water — leading to one of several dramatic rescues when cops saved an 88-year-old woman with dementia and a 94-year-old man with hypothermia, said NYPD Chief of Special Operations Division Harry Wedin.
In the Bronx, Emergency Service Unit cops rescued a pregnant woman and a man from a flooded car, officials said. And police plucked a stranded box-truck driver off the top of his vehicle, surrounded by eight feet of water.
Pablo Bravo, whose 66-year-old brother Roberto died in his East New York basement home, pointed fingers at the city Friday for the tragedy while acknowledging his own role in the death.
“There is a history here,” said Pablo outside the three-story building where he is the landlord. “The problem is with the catch basin in the sewer on the corner. The city needs to clean it out ... The sewer backed up and the water came rushing into the basement. There was nothing you could do.”
But Pablo Bravo also acknowledged what the DOB said: His building’s cellar was illegally converted into four single-room occupancy units, and his brother died in one of them.
“I tried to help him out, provide shelter,” said Pablo. “He was trying to get housing, but the bureaucracy got in the way.”
Residents of Hollis, Queens, recalled how their friends Phamatee Ramskriet, 43, and her 22-year-old son were always around the neighborhood before drowning in their home after a wall collapsed and their apartment flooded in an eye-blink.
The mother’s widowed husband and their other child managed to escape the watery graves of their relatives.
“How can you comprehend it?” asked neighbor Amrita Bhagwandin, 51. “Half the family is gone. That’s something that will never be fixed.”
Scuba divers were needed to locate the bodies in another illegally converted apartment, authorities said.
Not everyone in East Flushing was as fortunate as Escobar and Liu. The 60-year-old neighborhood man who shared a basement home with three drowning victims said the bottom level was subdivided into three apartments, with a shared kitchen space and a monthly rent of $370.
The man bid farewell to one of the doomed neighbors, a married couple and their 35-year-old daughter, before she left for work Wednesday morning.
“The woman asked my father, ‘Do you know if it’s going to rain?’” his son recounted. “He said, ‘It’s probably going to rain.’ He feels very, very sorry.”