Very heavy rains that fell overnight from Thursday to Friday in the northeast of the United States flooded roads in New York and partly paralyzed its subways and airports, with authorities calling on the population to be extremely careful.
There Governor of New York State, Kathy Hochul, declared a “state of emergency” for New York, Long Island to the east of the megacity, and in the Hudson Valley, due to “the extreme precipitation that we are observing,” she announced on X (formerly Twitter).
Water rising up to car windows
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 of the megacity’s gigantic subway network have been partially flooded and several central lines are closed in Brooklyn: “we continue to evacuate the water on the tracks caused by flooding in several stations in Brooklyn and Manhattan”, indicated on X the official account of the New York subway.
5 to 12 cm of rain in Manhattan
La Guardia Airport announced for its part that all access to Terminal A was “currently closed”. 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 to 7 cm still expected depending on the areas.
According to the U.S. Weather Service, the severe weather is caused by a low pressure system 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 of them trapped in basements. of houses transformed into apartments in a megacity struggling with a severe housing crisis.