The City Council will hold an oversight hearing on Sept. 14 to probe why Mayor Bill de Blasio and the MTA were caught flat-footed when catastrophic flooding from the remnants of Hurricane Ida killed 13 New Yorkers.
“What happened on Wednesday raises several urgent questions, including why we weren’t better prepared for an anticipated storm,” City Council Speaker Corey Johnson said in a statement Friday.
“We know climate change is an unavoidable factor at this point, so at the very least, we need an infallible plan to warn and protect New Yorkers for the storms to come,” said Johnson and three colleagues — Councilman Justin Brannan (D-Brooklyn) who chairs the waterfronts and resiliency committee, Ydanis Rodrigues (D-Manhattan) who runs the transportation committee and James Gennaro (D-Queens) of the environmental protection committee.
De Blasio has blamed forecasters, claiming he had “almost no warning” of the coming deluge. Yet shortly after 3 p.m. Wednesday the NWS Weather Prediction Center put out a dire warning about “significant and locally life-threatening flash flooding…expected going into the evening hours.”
People look at cars abandoned on the flooded Major Deegan Expressway following a night of extremely heavy rain from the remnants of Hurricane Ida. Spencer Platt/Getty Images
The 28th street subway station in Chelsea was badly flooded during the storm. Courtesy of the MTAMTA chairman Janno Lieber suggested there was no way to have anticipated the storm’s devastating impact, calling it a “historic event.”
Council reps did not immediately reply to queries about who they would testify at the hearing.
A member of the FDNY directs people stranded at a subway entrance during flash flooding caused by storm Ida in the New York City. Anthony Behar/Sipa USA