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Watch live: State of Emergency in effect as storm brings flooding, damage to New York City and beyond
NEW YORK – New York Gov. Kathy Hochul declared a state of emergency across New York City, Long Island and the Hudson Valley as Friday’s strong storm caused flooding and damage across the area.
New York City Mayor Eric Adams asked for city residents to shelter in place temporarily during the worst of the storm.
Significant flooding was reported throughout the five boroughs and beyond.
At Prospect Park, the lake overflowed and created a miniature river, with water gushing steadily into the street.
Some cars were almost totally submerged in Park Slope.
Mayor Adams asks NYC residents to shelter in place temporarily
Adams said New York City is under a State of Emergency.
“I want to say to all New Yorkers, this is time for heightened alertness and extreme caution. If you are home, stay home. If you are at work or school, shelter in place for now,” Adams said. “Some of our subways are flooded, and it’s extremely difficult to move around the city.”
Adams called the weather “dangerous” and said it’s not over.
“We could possibly see eight inches of rain before the day is over,” Adams said.
By 11:20 a.m., more than five inches of rain had fallen in Central Park since midnight.
Adams said that every New York City agency has a plan in place for the situation and is executing those plans.
“This is a time for caution, but it is also a time for community,” Adams said. “Check on neighbors. Do whatever is possible to unclog drain areas to allow the water to flow freely. You would be surprised how, if we remove leaves and other trash from those areas, it would really assist in getting water off our streets. Check on your friends, your relatives, and especially those who are most vulnerable, such as the elderly and individuals with health conditions.”
Hochul said the epicenter of the storm has since headed north toward Hudson Valley. She urged extreme caution to anyone thinking of driving in the rain.
“I will say this: If people decide to venture out in a vehicle, they do so at their own peril, because even six inches of rain, one foot of rain may look pretty innocuous, it’s safe, but that is a condition where your vehicle can be swept away. We lose more lives of people during flooding events, of which we’ve had many, especially this summer in the city and the Hudson Valley in particular. The reason people lose their lives in a flooding event, more often than not, is they’re swept away in their vehicle,” Hochul said. “So this is a choice people make. We encourage them not to decide to do that. Please stay home, be safe.”
“The storm picked up significantly soon after 7 a.m., and I think New Yorkers should be aware that between 8 and 9 a.m. the Brooklyn Navy Yard received 2.58 inches of rain in one hour,” DEP Commissioner Rohit T. Aggarwala said. “Our sewer system was designed for 1.75 inches per hour. And so, it’s no surprise, unfortunately as a result, that that part of Brooklyn, and a couple of other, particularly, parts of Brooklyn, have borne the brunt of this.”
New York City schools report no major flooding concerns
Schools Chancellor David Banks said no major problems were reported at New York City public schools, and that all of them were open.
“We do have a portion of our schools, approximately 150 out of the more than 1,400 schools that we have, that have in fact taken on some water, has presented some challenge, but nothing has impacted our ability to safely educate our students in any of those schools,” Banks said. “Our buses are prepositioned for dismissal. We’ve been in touch with all of our vendors, and they’re prepositioned means that they are staging early in order to have enough time to get our children home. These are high-axle vehicles, and they’ll be able to navigate any water in the roadways.”
Banks said going fully remote is “always the last option.”
“Our kids needs to be in school. This is also where they get their healthy meals as well,” Banks said. “Whenever we make a decision to close schools, it is a major, major disruption. So it is really only used as a last resort. And I think in this case, while this was a tough day in terms of the rain, it certainly did not put, our kids are not in danger. All of our schools are open. Our teachers are in school, our kids are in school, and doing well.”
Prospect Park lake overflows
Brooklyn got particularly hard hit Friday morning, although there were many reports of damage and flooding throughout New York City.
Prospect Park lake overflowed, creating a shocking scene for many in the area as a miniature river formed in the street, flowing into nearby intersections.
“You can see the debris from the lake water as it made its way down,” CBS New York’s Doug Williams reported. “It extends all the way into Ocean Parkway… it’s legitimately shocking to see.”
Williams called it basically a “river of water,” reporting that it had been flowing that way nearly all day.
“The lake has been known, when it gets heavy rainfall, to overflow,” Williams reported. “But people here, all day, have been trying to navigate it, almost shocked when they arrived.”
He described it as “basically rapids, and water coming down like a river.”
“We’ve seen people acting like they’ve never seen anything like it,” Williams reported. “It is certainly shocking to see.”
Major flooding in Rosedale, Queens
Roads were flooded at 147th Avenue in Rosedale.
CBS New York’s Jennifer Bisram reported a driver was forced to abandon her vehicle due to rising waters.
“That’s kind of the story around here – lots of flooded roads, lots of flooded basements,” Bisram reported.
She said residents were using hoses to drain water from basements.
Video shows massive flooding across New York City
Around 8:30 a.m., emergency responders were on the scene of a partial roof collapse at a warehouse on Lexington Avenue between Classon and Franklin Avenues. Fortunately all workers at the warehouse were accounted for, according to the FDNY.
In Windsor Terrace, neighbors said a tenant living in a basement apartment along Sherman Avenue managed to get out as his apartment began to flood.
Officials said at least six basement apartments flooded, and there were “successful rescues” at each.
“We have not had any fatalities today. We have had a number of calls for basements, people trapped in cars,” FDNY Commissioner Laura Kavanagh said.
Heavy rain brought flooding conditions at Walton Street between Union and Harrison Avenues. Water had overtaken the sidewalk and appeared to partially flood parked cars there.
Significant flooding was reported in southern Brooklyn. Video posted to X, formerly Twitter, also showed flooding near Atlantic Avenue and Pacific Street.
At Smith and Ninth Street, there was major flooding.
“My team & I are aware of widespread flooding & dangerous conditions across [Brooklyn]. Like many [New Yorkers], we’ve spent our mornings stranded on subways & buses, but we’re in communication [with] the offices of the mayor & governor & monitoring where conditions are worst,” Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso wrote on X.
Mass transit, roads, and airports all disrupted due to flooding
The floods, damage and impact weren’t limited to just Brooklyn, of course.
The FDR was closed in both directions at Delancey Street in Manhattan due to flooding.
The Belt Parkway was closed in both directions at Exit 6, Cropsey Avenue, the NYPD said.
There were extensive disruptions to subway and other mass transit service.
- Click here for an update on subway, mass transit and flight disruptions
- Click here to check the latest on the forecast
New York City public schools remained open.
Video posted to social media from across the area was shocking. Flooded intersections were spotted in Bushwick, Brooklyn.
The Prospect Park Expressway experienced significant flooding, with at least one car stalled out.
The Wildlife Conservation Society closed the Bronx Zoo, Central Park Zoo, Queens Zoo, Prospect Park Zoo and New York Aquarium due to the emergency.
Stay with us as we continue to cover this weather emergency.
Renad Atallah is an unlikely internet sensation: a 10-year-old chef, with a repertoire of simple recipes, cooking in war-torn Gaza. She has nearly a million followers on Instagram, who’ve witnessed her delight as she unpacks parcels of food aid.
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We interviewed Renad via satellite, though we were just 50 miles away, in Tel Aviv. [Israel doesn’t allow outside journalists into Gaza, except on brief trips with the country’s military.]
“There are a lot of dishes I’d like to cook, but the ingredients aren’t available in the market,” Renad told us. “Milk used to be easy to buy, but now it’s become very expensive.”
I asked, “How does it feel when so many people like your internet videos?”
“All the comments were positive,” she said. “When I’m feeling tired or sad and I want something to cheer me up, I read the comments.”
We sent a local camera crew to Renad’s home as she made Ful, a traditional Middle Eastern bean stew. Her older sister Noorhan says they never expected the videos to go viral. “Amazing food,” Noorhan said, who added that her sibling made her “very surprised!”
After more than a year of war, the Gaza Strip lies in ruins. Nearly everyone has been displaced from their homes. The United Nations says close to two million people are experiencing critical levels of hunger.
Hamada Shaqoura is another chef showing the outside world how Gazans are getting by, relying on food from aid packages, and cooking with a single gas burner in a tent.
Shaqoura also volunteers with the charity Watermelon Relief, which makes sweet treats for Gaza’s children.
In his videos online, Shaqoura always appears very serious. Asked why, he replied, “The situation does not call for smiling. What you see on screen will never show you how hard life is here.”
Before dawn one recent morning in Israel, we watched the UN’s World Food Program load nearly two dozen trucks with flour, headed across the border. The problem is not a lack of food; the problem is getting the food into the Gaza Strip, and into the hands of those who desperately need it.
The UN has repeatedly accused Israel of obstructing aid deliveries to Gaza. Israel’s government denies that, and claims that Hamas is hijacking aid.
“For all the actors that are on the ground, let the humanitarians do their work,” said Antoine Renard, the World Food Program’s director in the Palestinian territories.
I asked, “Some people might see these two chefs and think, well, they’re cooking, they have food.”
“They have food, but they don’t have the right food; they’re trying to accommodate with anything that they can find,” Renard said.
Even in our darkest hour, food can bring comfort. But for many in Gaza, there’s only the anxiety of not knowing where they’ll find their next meal.
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Story produced by Mikaela Bufano. Editor: Carol Ross.
See also:
“Sunday Morning” 2024 “Food Issue” recipe index
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It’s been said the best meals come from the heart, not from a recipe book. But at this USDA kitchen, there’s no pinch of this, dash of that, no dollops or smidgens of anything. Here, nutritionists in white coats painstakingly measure every single ingredient, down to the tenth of a gram.
Sheryn Stover is expected to eat every crumb of her pizza; any tiny morsels she does miss go back to the kitchen, where they’re scrutinized like evidence of some dietary crime.
Stover (or participant #8180, as she’s known) is one of some 10,000 volunteers enrolled in a $170 million nutrition study run by the National Institutes of Health. “At 78, not many people get to do studies that are going to affect a great amount of people, and I thought this was a great opportunity to do that,” she said.
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It’s called the Nutrition for Precision Health Study. “When I tell people about the study, the reaction usually is, ‘Oh, that’s so cool, can I do it?'” said coordinator Holly Nicastro.
She explained just what “precise” precisely means: “Precision nutrition means tailoring nutrition or dietary guidance to the individual.”
The government has long offered guidelines to help us eat better. In the 1940s we had the “Basic 7.” In the ’50s, the “Basic 4.” We’ve had the “Food Wheel,” the “Food Pyramid,” and currently, “My Plate.”
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They’re all well-intentioned, except they’re all based on averages – what works best for most people, most of the time. But according to Nicastro, there is no one best way to eat. “We know from virtually every nutrition study ever conducted, we have inner individual variability,” she said. “That means we have some people that are going to respond, and some people that aren’t. There’s no one-size-fits-all.”
The study’s participants, like Stover, are all being drawn from another NIH study program called All Of Us, a massive undertaking to create a database of at least a million people who are volunteering everything from their electronic health records to their DNA. It was from that All of Us research that Stover discovered she has the gene that makes some foods taste bitter, which could explain why she ate more of one kind of food than another.
Professor Sai Das, who oversees the study at Tufts University, says the goal of precision nutrition is to drill down even deeper into those individual differences. “We’re moving away from just saying everybody go do this, to being able to say, ‘Okay, if you have X, Y and Z characteristics, then you’re more likely to respond to a diet, and somebody else that has A, B and C characteristics will be responding to the diet differently,'” Das said.
It’s a big commitment for Stover, who is one of 150 people being paid to live at a handful of test sites around the country for six weeks – two weeks at a time. It’s so precise she can’t even go for a walk without a dietary chaperone. “Well, you could stop and buy candy … God forbid, you can’t do that!” she laughed.
While she’s here, everything from her resting metabolic rate, her body fat percentage, her bone mineral content, even the microbes in her gut (digested by a machine that essentially is a smart toilet paper reading device) are being analyzed for how hers may differ from someone else’s.
Nicastro said, “We really think that what’s going on in your poop is going to tell us a lot of information about your health and how you respond to food.”
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Stover says she doesn’t mind, except for the odd sounds the machine makes. While she is a live-in participant, thousands of others are participating from their homes, where electronic wearables track all kinds of health data, including special glasses that record everything they eat, activated when someone starts chewing. Artificial intelligence can then be used to determine not only which foods the person is eating, but how many calories are consumed.
This study is expected to be wrapped up by 2027, and because of it, we may indeed know not only to eat more fruits and vegetables, but what combination of foods is really best for us. The question that even Holly Nicastro can’t answer is, will we listen? “You can lead a horse to water; you can’t make them drink,” she said. “We can tailor the interventions all day. But one hypothesis I have is that if the guidance is tailored to the individual, it’s going to make that individual more likely to follow it, because this is for me, this was designed for me.”
For more info:
Story produced by Mark Hudspeth. Editor: Ed Givnish.
“Sunday Morning” 2024 “Food Issue” recipe index
Delicious menu suggestions from top chefs, cookbook authors, food writers, restaurateurs, and the editors of Food & Wine magazine.
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