NYC can start to dry off today following Friday’s heavy rain, floods
Waterlogged cars abandoned during Friday’s torrential downpours that inundated the tri-state area were towed from shoulder of the Bronx River Parkway on Saturday as New Yorkers surveyed the damage and tried to resume their routines.
Over seven inches of rain drenched the region in under 24 hours, flooding schools and homes and shutting down roadways and much of mass transit.
Following a power outage caused by the rainfall, NYC Health + Hospitals/Woodhull was forced to evacuate and transfer 120 patients to other facilities on Saturday so repairs could be made.
The hospital resorted to back-up emergency power at first, but Con Edison needed to shut it down to make necessary repairs, the hospital said in a statement.
The hospital estimates it will be several days before the work is completed and it can resume normal patient care.
No deaths were reported in the region as a result of the storm.
Elsewhere on Saturday, much of the Big Apple was drying off and returning to normal.
Brothers Brian and Jose Criollo were back to exercising in McCarren Park, relieved that the deluge had passed.
“It made me just stay home all day doing nothing when I’d rather go outside,” said Jose, 24. “I couldn’t wait to come back outside and go for a run and play soccer.”
The city had come to “a halt,” said Brian, 20.
“I felt bad because people have families, they got to go to work. Some people just want to come out here and practice because it’s their passion, and the rain just stopped all of that,” he said.
“It was a hard day – harder on the dog than it was for me, for sure,” said Deanna Director, who was walking her 10-year-old Chihuahua-Pomeranian rescue, Vincent Van Gogh, in Williamsburg on Saturday.
Director saw street lamps downed and trash washed up from the East River along the Williamsburg waterfront, sections of which were cordoned off following the storm.
But sunny days are ahead, with clear skies and temperatures in the high 70s forecast for Sunday, according to the National Weather Service.
The windy conditions that New York City and the rest of the tri-state area experienced while being smacked with remnants of Tropical Storm Ophelia late Thursday and Friday will dissipate over the weekend, Fox Weather meteorologist Brian Mastro told The Post.
There were no significant delays reported at JFK, LaGuardia or Newark Liberty airports on Saturday — unlike a day earlier when all experienced major delays and cancellations.
JFK Airport was walloped with 7.97 inches of rain on Friday — a new daily record dating back to 1948, when data was first collected, according to Fox Weather.
But other parts of the Big Apple were just was wet, including Brooklyn where a month’s worth of rain, up to 4.5 inches, reportedly fell in only 3 hours on Friday morning.
Meanwhile, videos showed cars plowing through knee-deep water in Brooklyn’s Sunset Park neighborhood, with a whirlpool seen swirling in the middle of the waterlogged road.
Cellphone footage taken aboard a city bus at 18th Avenue and 60th Street in Brooklyn’s Bensonhurst neighborhood showed floodwaters gushing into the vehicle filled with passengers, among them children, who tried to stay dry by lifting their feet off the floor.
