Heavy rains flood NYC streets, subways
Tropical Storm Elsa keeps transit workers busy addressing issues
Heavy rains continued to spill through New York, New Jersey and Connecticut on Friday morning as Tropical Storm Elsa made its way up the Northeast coast.
After a night of relentless storms and mass flooding, tropical storm warnings and flash flood watches were in place until Friday afternoon, according to the National Weather Service. The storm is expected to pass through southern New England with winds up to 50 mph, prompting flood warnings until 4 p.m. for parts of Massachusetts.
In Westernville, New York, in Oneida County, severe thunderstorms uprooted trees, ripped out roofs and downed power lines, according to posts on social media Friday morning. The National Weather Service will conduct a survey Friday to determine whether the storms were actually part of a tornado.
Connecticut was hit with major floods Friday morning as several inches of water filled the streets of Hartford and downtown New Haven. In West Haven, Metro North service was suspended after rainfall caused a landslide near the tracks.
Nassau County on Long Island issued an advisory against bathing at 17 of its beaches prone to elevated bacteria levels during heavy rainfall, which can increase stormwater runoff.
And in New York City and its suburbs, heavy rains prompted the police to rescue more than a dozen people from one flooded stretch of highway Thursday and forced would-be subway riders to navigate waist-deep waters on their way into one upper Manhattan station.
Videos posted on Twitter showed several subway stations taking on water — some from above, some from below.
The No. 1 station at Broadway and 157th Street in Manhattan appeared to suffer the most dire effects of the storm, with some passengers opting to wade through filthy water on their way to the platform.
Transit officials, already girding for Elsa’s arrival, said they had crews out across the city addressing the flooding problems as quickly as possible and warned against entering stations that might still be inundated.
“Drains are working remarkably well,” Sarah Feinberg, interim president of New York City Transit, which operates the subway, said in a message on Twitter.
The agency’s crews, she added, were “as always, working hard and fast and doing great work. Give them room to work and be safe.”
Subway service itself was largely uninterrupted, with only the northernmost end of the A line shut down as a result of the rains, officials said.
In an interview, Feinberg said the flooding of stations Thursday was a result of a confluence of factors: underground drains being overwhelmed by the ferocity of the rain, vents and stairways serving as conduits for the same reason, and street-level flooding spilling over curbs and down into the subway.