New York City flooded by torrential rains, its subway partly paralyzed

The authorities are calling on the population to exercise extreme caution. Very heavy rain, which fell during the night of Thursday September 28 to Friday September 29 in the northeast of the United States, flooded roads in New York and partly paralyzed its metro and airports. New York State Governor Kathy Hochul said “emergency state” for New York, Long Island and the Hudson Valley. A decision taken due to “extreme precipitation we are seeing”she announced on X (formerly Twitter).

Images reported by AFP journalists, local media and on social networks showed vehicles traveling with difficulty on flooded roads, or even completely blocked with water rising up to the level of car windows.

Several stations on the metro network in the megacity have been partially flooded and several central lines are closed in Brooklyn. “We continue to evacuate water from the tracks caused by flooding at several stations in Brooklyn and Manhattan,” announced on X the official account of the New York subway.

La Guardia Airport announced for its part that all access to Terminal A was “currently closed”.

Between 2.5 and 7 cm of rain still expected

The New York Democratic congresswoman, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, announced in an email to her constituents that 5 to 12 cm of rain had fallen in the boroughs of Manhattan, Queens and Brooklyn, with 2.5 at 7 cm still expected depending on the areas.

According to the US Weather Service, the severe weather is caused by a depression along the mid-Atlantic coast, which draws moist air from the ocean, “producing areas of heavy rain over northern and eastern regions”.

These floods are taken seriously by the authorities of New York, where Hurricane Ida caused the death of 13 people in September 2021 and several dozen others in the region. Most had been trapped in the basements of houses converted into apartments, in a megacity struggling with a severe housing crisis.