Cloudy skies. Slight chance of a shower throughout the evening. Low 49F. Winds NW at 10 to 15 mph..
Cloudy skies. Slight chance of a shower throughout the evening. Low 49F. Winds NW at 10 to 15 mph.
Roughly 75 people attended Thursday evening’s town hall in Flushing, during which they recounted the details of their chronic flooding problems.
Roughly 75 people attended Thursday evening’s town hall in Flushing, during which they recounted the details of their chronic flooding problems.
Chris DiLaurenta lives right across the street from Kissena Park. Since Hurricane Ida last September, he says, his house has flooded five times, each time with several feet of water. He attributes that in large part to his living next to the only catch basin for a block and a half.
“If I’m not home and I don’t clean the catch basin in front of the house — like I was out last week from 10 o’clock to 12:30, sitting there with the rake, keeping it clean — my house floods.”
DiLaurenta’s story was just one of many shared at Thursday evening’s town hall, during which roughly 75 Flushing residents flocked to the cafeteria at PS 24 to voice their concerns to the Department of Environmental Protection.
The town hall comes just over a year after Hurricane Ida, which devastated communities throughout the borough, including in Flushing and the area surrounding Kissena Park. Three of the 11 Queens residents who died during Ida lived just off of Peck Avenue.
The event presented an opportunity not only for residents to recount the details of their chronic flooding problems, but also for area elected officials, Councilmember Sandra Ung (D-Flushing), Rep. Grace Meng (D-Flushing) and state Sen. John Liu (D-Bayside), who collectively hosted the event, to hear about the DEP’s plans for the area.
Those plans are, at this point, nonexistent. Vinny Sapienza, the DEP’s chief operating officer and its former commissioner, said the agency has hired Dewberry, an engineering consulting firm, to assess the sewer system in the Kissena Park corridor. Asked by Ung, he estimated that a draft redesign plan would be ready by Thanksgiving.
Sapienza attributed the area’s propensity for flooding to two main factors: its low elevation and the sewer system’s capacity.
“This community is at the bottom of a topographical bowl,” he said.
Runoff therefore flows downhill toward the homes. And when there’s more rainfall than the surrounding catch basins can handle, they’re flooded. Sapienza used the borough’s most recent bout of flooding on Sept. 13, when Flushing was hit hard once again, as an example.
“The entire city’s sewer system was built for a different climate reality than we have now, so this community is suffering even more with these intense rains,” he said. He added that years of insufficient funding have prevented the department from making long-overdue upgrades.
But residents were not satisfied with those explanations. During the hourlong question and answer session, Minnie Zen, a community member and former DEP engineer, vehemently denounced Sapienza’s rationale: “The sewer is not designed to capacity.”
“According to a report recently from the OMB, your sewer can only take 1.75 inches [of rainwater] per hour,” she said. “The criteria to design the sewer is 5.95.”
“For 26 years, nothing has been done.”
And while Zen’s neighbors were certainly impressed by her, offering her a round of applause upon the end of her remarks, they were far less taken with Sapienza’s suggestions throughout the evening. When one community member said she’d spent thousands on repairs after multiple incidents of flooding and sewage in her basement, Sapienza suggested that she — and others in attendance — ought to install a check valve, a piece that is intended to prevent waste from the city sewer line from coming into one’s home. The resident said she already had one.
Not only did those in attendance seem to think a check valve alone would not solve the problem, but as many pointed out, getting one installed can be costly. Some said they’d spent as much as $1,100 on them.
Acknowledging that cost, Meng said that legislation to create a grant or subsidization program for such devices is being considered at the federal level.
As another homeowner noted, not all check valves can be installed in a basement — some would need to be installed under the sidewalk or street. To do that, one would need to get a permit from the Department of Transportation.
In lieu of a check valve, some have had to get creative. One resident recalled having to stuff a pillow in the toilet to stop water from pouring out of it during one recent storm.
Though some funding for disaster assistance has been made available through the Federal Emergency Management Agency, that support does not seem to have gone very far. As one resident, who only received $5,500 in aid, put it, “You know what that in that paid for? That paid for the dumpsters next to my house when my husband and I had to rip out the basement.”
Sapienza had noted earlier that flood repairs for basements “are always a challenge.”
“FEMA considers a basement to be not a living space, maybe you have your hot water heater, your boiler, a washer and dryer — that’s all they’re going to pay you for,” he said. He did acknowledge, however, that basement apartments and dwelling spaces are a reality in New York City, especially during a housing crisis.
Still, residents have grown impatient with the DEP. As one person put it Thursday night, “We need a solution right now. Not another 20 years later.”
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