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- Feature: New York’s Flood Sensors Show Where Stormwater Dollars Should Go First. - From the archive: Alabama Paid for Stronger Roofs. Hurricane Claims Fell Up to 74%. - In the news: This Year’s Powerful El Niño May Preview California’s Climate Future.
New York City just had its wettest summer in five years and has spent one-third of the entire year under a flash flood emergency activation. The city’s extensive flood-monitoring network enables city officials to see where its streets flood, how deep the water gets, and where to focus its investments in stormwater resilience.
FloodNet, a network of 431 street-level flood sensors, measures the depth of floodwaters in real time. Central Park recorded 16.92 inches of rain from June through August, about 3.5 inches above normal. On August 20, the Hollis neighborhood in Queens flooded for the second time in three months. New York City Comptroller Mark Levine counted nine floods deeper than a foot across the city this summer. “It’s not your imagination,” he wrote in a social media post. “We are in the age of extreme weather.”
More data is incoming: FloodSafe NY, a network for monitoring rivers and streams across the state, was announced in September, and CHORUS, a community flood-modeling tool from Georgia Tech and the New York Climate Exchange, adds neighborhood-level modeling.
New York is already one of the country’s leaders on stormwater management, and new data from sensors and gauges gives the city the evidence base to scale flood defenses for this new normal.
Here are three opportunities for the city to invest in resilience highlighted by New York non-profits Rebuild by Design and the Waterfront Alliance:
This summer’s sensor records suggest that parts of the city need to set an even higher bar. On May 20, a sensor in Hollis, Queens, recorded 46 inches of street-level water in under two hours. On July 18, a sensor in the Fresh Meadows neighborhood in Queens logged 29.3 inches in about an hour. A National Weather Service meteorologist told Insurance Journal that “an inch an hour” is usually enough to cause flooding in the city, which suggests streets can flood even before sewers reach their current design capacity. Sensor data makes triage easier, pointing to the neighborhoods where the gap between rainfall load and current drainage capacity is widest.
2. Spend on inland rain as well as the coast
New York City recently announced $43.2 million of city funding for coastal flood-protection work, growing the Bureau of Coastal Resilience from six staff to 75. But inland heavy rain, not just tidal flooding, has the potential to cause major damage. This summer, Notify NYC had to send out warning after warning telling residents in basement apartments to prepare to move to higher ground. The coastal work is necessary, but the rainfall data is showing that inland streets need as much attention.
Rebuild by Design and the Waterfront Alliance, a platform for ideas on improving civic life in New York City, suggests a governance solution: create a dedicated “rainproofing” leadership role with the authority to convene agencies and track metrics. A rain-flooding team could use FloodNet to quickly determine which blocks flood, how often, and which types of infrastructure projects have the biggest impact.
3. Match the pace of investments to the urgency of the risk
New York’s Department of Environmental Protection spends roughly $1 billion a year on stormwater capital improvements across the city. Rebuild by Design and the Waterfront Alliance estimate that at this rate, reaching the 80-plus stormwater priority areas would take about 30 years, while a full system upgrade would cost more than $250 billion. Thirty years is a long wait for a city that logged flooding at 98 sensor locations during one storm this summer. Individual projects move slowly, too: Prospect Park’s $68 million stormwater system will not start construction until 2029 and will finish in 2032. Speeding up will require funding more projects at once, and sensor records of which areas flood most often and deepest can set the order of the queue.
High-quality, more granular data on rain-induced flooding can improve the targeting of resilience investments. The next stage is to streamline governance and investment processes to make these investments happen.
Four Lessons in Resilience From Hurricane Helene | GovTech | Two years after Hurricane Helene, North Carolina’s investments in resilience include installing solar-powered microgrids at essential facilities, building backup communication networks with two-way radios, teaching residents practical tool skills, and including people with disabilities in emergency planning.
This Year’s Powerful El Niño May Preview California’s Climate Future | KQED | This winter’s El Niño offers a warning to California, as temporarily elevated sea levels and intense storms threaten coastal highways, airports, and low-lying neighborhoods. Researchers warn that flooding and erosion risks will become harder to manage, alongside shorter rainy seasons and heavier downpours.
How Trump’s Disaster Aid Delays and FEMA Cuts Could Galvanize the ‘Movable Middle’ in the 2026 Elections | The Conversation | As FEMA staffing cuts and delayed disaster aid leave communities waiting months for help, disaster recovery is becoming a political liability for the Trump administration. Research suggests that people who experience disasters become more civically engaged, particularly political moderates.
Read more about resilient public infrastructure and government solutions on The Epicenter here.
13 Million High-Risk Homes Sit Outside FEMA Flood Zones as El Niño Looms | Realtor.com | Nearly 13 million properties considered high-risk for flooding sit outside FEMA’s designated high-risk flood zones, according to a Government Accountability Office report. Rainfall-driven flooding accounts for 62% of these properties’ primary flood threats, yet only 2% have federal flood insurance, compared with 43% of properties inside FEMA’s high-risk zones.
Read more about resilient real estate on The Epicenter here.
The Statistic of the Week
150%
Increase in the number of days with over one inch of rain that New York City could experience by the end of this century.
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The Epicenter helps decision-makers understand climate risks and discover viable resilience solutions. The Epicenter is an affiliated publication of The Resiliency Company, a 501(c)3 nonprofit dedicated to inspiring and empowering humanity to adapt to the accelerating challenges of the next 100+ years.
