Flash flooding swamps NYC subways and suspends Staten Island rail service as storms hit five boroughs

Flash flooding tore through New York City's five boroughs and parts of New Jersey on Thursday afternoon as a line of severe thunderstorms dumped as much as 2 inches of rain in under an hour, swamping subway entrances, stranding drivers and forcing the suspension of a commuter rail line just as the evening commute began.

The National Weather Service issued a Flash Flood Warning for all five New York City boroughs at 4:15 p.m. Eastern, effective until 7:15 p.m., after forecasters clocked rainfall rates of 1 to 2 inches an hour with more on the way. A second warning covered Essex, Hudson and Union counties in New Jersey and Staten Island until 6:30 p.m. "Turn around, don't drown when encountering flooded roads," the agency's bulletin read.

Warnings stacked up through the afternoon

The deluge had been forecast for days. New York City Emergency Management issued a travel advisory Wednesday warning that Thursday's storms could bring locally heavy rainfall of half an inch to 1.5 inches, with isolated totals up to 2.5 inches, and wind gusts as high as 65 mph. A Severe Thunderstorm Watch covering the city, Long Island, the lower Hudson Valley and much of New Jersey remained in effect until 8 p.m., layered on top of a citywide Flood Watch that ran until 11 p.m.

By late afternoon those warnings had proven out. Unofficial rain gauges on Staten Island showed nearly 2 inches had fallen by 5 p.m., and radar-estimated totals in parts of Queens and the Bronx approached similar marks within a single hour — well above the roughly 1.5 to 1.75 inches per hour that the city's century-old sewer system is generally built to handle.

• 4:15 p.m. – 7:15 p.m. ET: Flash Flood Warning for all five NYC boroughs (Bronx, Kings, New York, Queens, Richmond counties)
• 3:33 p.m. – 6:30 p.m. ET: separate Flash Flood Warning for Essex, Hudson and Union counties, N.J., and Richmond County, N.Y.
• Rainfall rates of 1 to 2 inches per hour, with isolated totals near 2 inches reported on Staten Island
• Severe Thunderstorm Watch in effect until 8 p.m., citywide Flood Watch until 11 p.m., wind gusts forecast up to 65 mph

Subways and streets buckled under the water

The first visible strain showed up underground. At the Roosevelt Avenue–Jackson Heights station in Queens, one of the busiest transfer points in the subway system, water poured through a station entrance and sent commuters wading through ankle-deep runoff on the walkways above the platforms. Flooding was also reported along the Major Deegan Expressway in the Bronx and along Midland Avenue and Hylan Boulevard on Staten Island, where the Fire Department pulled a motorist from a car stuck in high water on Bedford Avenue; officials said no injuries were reported.

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority suspended Staten Island Railway service in both directions between the Huguenot and Tottenville stations after flooding near Richmond Valley made the tracks impassable. Subway riders elsewhere in the system faced scattered delays as signals and drainage struggled to keep pace with the rain, echoing service alerts the MTA has posted repeatedly this summer whenever downpours exceed an inch an hour. In Sayreville, New Jersey, a lightning strike tied to the same storm line touched off a house fire, according to local reports, and police departments across the Tri-State region reported downed trees and scattered power outages as the line of storms pushed east.

"Most New Yorkers will likely see a period of wet and unsettled weather, but localized conditions can become more hazardous quickly," NYC Emergency Management Commissioner Christina Farrell said in the agency's advisory ahead of the storm.

Who is feeling it

The brunt fell on evening commuters trying to get out of Manhattan and into the outer boroughs and New Jersey, on Staten Island Railway riders left to find alternate routes, and on residents of basement apartments across the city, who city officials specifically urged to be ready to move to higher floors. Drivers on flood-prone highways — the Major Deegan, the Belt Parkway approaches and low-lying stretches of Staten Island — were told to expect standing water and to avoid driving through it. Small businesses along commercial strips in Jackson Heights and on Staten Island's south shore, both areas with histories of street flooding, also faced the prospect of water damage as storms continued into the evening.

Mayor Zohran Mamdani, in the city's official guidance, kept the message simple: "Never drive through floodwaters. If you're in immediate danger, call 911." He also asked New Yorkers to "report downed trees, blocked catch basins and other nonemergency hazards to 311" rather than tying up emergency lines. City agencies had spent the prior day pre-positioning barricades and pumps at chronically flood-prone intersections and subway entrances, part of a now-routine playbook for named advisories that did not exist before the city's most severe recent flooding events.

An infrastructure problem the city keeps confronting

Thursday's storm is the latest test of a subway and stormwater system that has flooded repeatedly during intense downpours in recent years. The remnants of Hurricane Ida in September 2021 killed more than a dozen people in the city, many in flooded basement apartments, and prompted a broad overhaul of the city's flash-flood alert protocols and the creation of the very kind of advisory system that flagged Thursday's storm days in advance. City and state officials have since pointed to climate change as a driver of more frequent short, intense downpours that overwhelm drainage built for a gentler era of rainfall, and the MTA has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on pumps, grates and barriers at flood-prone stations — money that did not prevent Thursday's flooding at Roosevelt Avenue.

The National Weather Service's advisory placed the New York City area in a "slight risk" — level 2 of 4 — for excessive rainfall Thursday, with a "marginal risk," or level 1 of 5, for severe thunderstorms capable of producing damaging winds and isolated tornadoes. Neither is the most severe category the agency issues, underscoring how comparatively routine summer storms can still cripple transit and flood streets in a city where impervious pavement and an aging drainage grid leave little room for error. Similar downpours have shut down stretches of the 1, 2, 3, E, F, M and R lines in past summers, each time reviving the same debate over how quickly the MTA and the city's Department of Environmental Protection can modernize a sewer network largely designed more than half a century ago for a cooler, less erratic climate.

What happens next

The Flash Flood Warning for the five boroughs was set to expire at 7:15 p.m., with the broader Flood Watch continuing until 11 p.m. and the Severe Thunderstorm Watch lapsing at 8 p.m., though forecasters cautioned that additional cells could still develop through the evening rush before conditions gradually cleared overnight. The MTA had not said when Staten Island Railway service between Huguenot and Tottenville would resume, and city officials continued to urge residents to check for updates through the Notify NYC alert system before heading out. Cleanup crews were expected to assess flooded roadways and storm drains after the rain moved offshore, with a drier, more seasonable pattern forecast to return to the region by the weekend.