Videos: New Yorkers Navigate Subways, Roadways During Massive Flooding Event

July 23, 2019, 9:22 a.m.

Just invest in rain boots, goggles, and typhus shots.

Flooding near the Gowanus

Flooding near the Gowanus

We were warned of the torrential downpours and flash flooding that would hit on Monday night, but New York City was not quite prepared for the punishing weather event. Let's take a look—here's how Gowanus handled it:

A woman who was in the Brooklyn neighborhood by 4th Avenue and Carroll Street told NBC New York, "I was scared because I was in sandals. Water almost to my waist." The station reported that an Uber driver "said the water came up close to his car's window in just seconds. He was stranded on Carroll Street hours after he and his passenger escaped the rising water by crawling out the windows."

"Before the three summers of work to dig up Carroll and replace the sewers, which involved removing lots of large beautiful trees that provided shade for the older neighbors to socialize under but were incompatible with large drilling equipment, this intersection used to flood constantly, even with much less heavy rain," Tim Sachs explained to us. "I heard some of my neighbors wondering how this could happen again after all those summers of digging to address this very issue."

City Council Member Brad Lander had an answer:

Things were also very bad in Williamsburg, where one extremely courageous woman decided to just go for it:

One intrepid woman got out of her car and physically cleared the clogged sewer on the Long Island Expressway:

Flooding also hit Crown Heights. State Senator Zellnor Myrie was frustrated with the city's infrastructure, after Con Ed's deliberate outages and the 2/3 and 4/5 issues:

Reminder: When there's a huge downpour, the city's sewer system can't handle it, so that runoff will often end up in... the subway system:

Gowanus was cleared by late Monday night:

But let's face it...

Just invest in rain boots, goggles, and tetanus shots: