Extreme weather in New York is normal – but not this extreme

In the grand scheme of things, I got off lightly during Hurricane Ida – sadly, the same cannot be said for many other residents of the city, writes Holly Baxter

Hard rain falling: a man carries a brolly as streets in the Bronx flood over (Getty)

As Hurricane Ida’s remnants climbed the eastern seaboard and hit New York City a week ago, I paid it all little mind. We’re used to summer being a tropical season in New York, with blazing hot weather regularly interrupted by short, sharp storms in the afternoons and evenings. My eyes had glazed over when my news app gave me updates about the incoming rain, simply because we’ve been in this so many times. Even when I got an alert that I should “shelter in place”, I simply shrugged and went to bed.

Throughout the night, I was woken a few times by the brightness of the lightning and the sound of the thunder, but I put the disturbance in my slumber down to jetlag. After all, storms happen all the time. My cat, who usually sleeps through bad weather, did react a little differently: he perched on the windowsill above my bed and periodically yowled at the wind, but again I simply thought he was protesting an upheaval in his usual routine. Extreme weather is normal here, I reminded myself, as I tossed and turned while the rain rattled the reinforced windowpanes.

Some of the lives lost will never be fully known about by the wider populace, and their relatives in other countries might never find out what happened to them

In the morning, it became clear that though some extreme weather is normal in New York, that doesn’t usually mean this extreme. A friend sent pictures of flooded-out subway stations on her way to work. The stations nearest to me were all closed down. The sidewalk was covered in tree branches and ripped-out plants — though by the time I ventured out in the early afternoon, almost all of them had been wrapped up into neat little bundles of kindling by the local community. For the most part, pathways were clear and the damage to our local park was limited to an excess of mud.

It was a different story for the basement of our building. Almost all basement apartments are illegal in New York City, because local laws mean people must have at least two exit points in case of fire or flood. Basement apartments rarely have windows big enough for a human to squeeze through, which makes them de facto illegal in almost all buildings and especially converted brownstones. In my building, the only things in the basement are amenities: the car park, a small library, the gym and the laundry room. When I ventured down to those on the morning after Hurricane Ida, it was clear why the news was full of ruined basement dwellings. The washing machines in the laundry room were wrecked through water damage; the library and the gym were under inches of water; even the ping-pong table in the atrium had a puddle on it.

This was, of course, small fry compared to what my neighbours elsewhere in Brooklyn and the other boroughs were experiencing. Times Square was now a water feature; the bridges were flooded so badly that most people had abandoned their cars in the middle of the night and walked away. Streets not far from me had had their storm drains fail and start pumping out dirty water. Another friend sent me a video from her phone of a rat swimming out of the subway.

Even worse, local radio stations were pumping out tragic stories of undocumented immigrants living in illegally converted basement apartments drowning when the storm flooded their bedrooms. A mother and son had been trapped and killed by water running down the stairs and into their small living space. Some of the lives lost will never be fully known about by the wider populace, and their relatives in other countries might never find out what happened to them. America is a country where so many live in the shadows, even as they pay taxes and contribute meaningfully to the economy.

The news dribbled out of New York and reached the UK properly 48 hours later. That’s when I started getting panicked phone calls and texts from friends and family (“LET ME KNOW U R ALIVE,” texted my mum, as compared to a friend who sent me a message saying: “Just checking you’re not floating on a mattress somewhere.”) It was strange fielding these calls when Ida had packed her bags and left, and the weather had immediately reverted to being bright, sunny and blue-skied.

Looking out the window today – or, indeed, in the basement of my own building, which was rapidly and impressively disinfected and repaired by an army of very competent people – and you’d never know NYC had been hit by a tropical storm. But there are so many, of course, for whom this isn’t true: those in rural areas who lost everything they own and are now in financial ruin; those who lost their lives in the city, trapped in substandard housing; those whose belongings were wrecked beyond repair. New York has snapped back remarkably quickly as a city, but the knowledge that climate change will only make these kinds of incidents worse is in the background. We are not a southern state and we are not supposed to be a part of the hurricane season. If extreme weather continues to be an issue in decades to come, that might all change.