蜜芽传媒

At least nine people are dead after flash flooding and tornadoes hit the north-east US. Some people were trapped in flooded basements; one body was retrieved from a vehicle.

New York streets resembled rivers and water poured onto subway platforms, forcing most lines to close. Hundreds of flights have been cancelled. The US National Weather Service said at least seven centimetres of water had fallen in an hour in New York's Central Park - shattering a record set only last week.听
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Karin Block is an associate professor of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the City College of New York and is at home in Brooklyn. The 蜜芽传媒's James Menendez asked her how bad were things last night?

"We didn't think that it would be quite so bad, but we were wrong," she says.

"Our infrastructure simply cannot handle [these storms]. We have a lot of paved surfaces that are impervious to seepage to the subsurface. In addition to that we've had two other storms in the past two weeks that have also dumped a huge amount of water and the ground is just saturated. Any of the runoff then overwhelms the sewer system and begins to bubble up through the basements."

"This is something that we can expect to see more frequently in the future. And for cities like New York that are not equipped to experience these large tropical storms... it's spelling some catastrophic conditions for city-dwellers."

Photo shows: First responders pull local residents in a boat as they perform rescues of people trapped by floodwaters after the remnants of Tropical Storm Ida brought drenching rain, flash floods and tornadoes to parts of the northeast in Mamaroneck, New York, U.S. September 2, 2021. Credit: Reuters

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