Happy Nice Mall

How do you keep water out when it seems unstoppable? This is the question that prompted Carrie Moore to stick to her phone when it rains and scan weather radar apps to determine if the basement of her Sunset Park rowhouse will flood.

So now sandbags fill her back door, and she and her husband, 42, Ryan Moore, stayed up until 4 a.m. the night when Hurricane Ida poured a historic amount of rain over New York City. They spent the next night and early morning chasing the overflowing sewage and rainwater from the basement toilet and shower, seeping through the sump pump and seeping through the foundation.

Despite efforts, their finished basement filled with a foot of water.

“It’s getting worse and worse with the intensity of the rains, so flooding seems to be a normal occurrence,” said Ms Moore, 42, architect and president of the 37th Street Block Association. It includes homes between Fourth and Fifth Avenues. “I know I can’t win when water comes to our house. Water will win.”

Ms. Moore blames a sewer network on her block for backups that have damaged her home and many others. Up until Ida, the Moores, who owned their home for five years, were able to confine the sewer overflow to the basement bathroom, even as storms became stronger and more frequent. But now, as they remove drywall and pull out ceramic tile floors in the basement’s main living area, they grapple with a question shared by many in the area: If anything, what can they do to prevent it? is it happening again?

Despite the damage done, their blocks did not survive worst flood in town. The storm killed large numbers of people in the Northeast, including more than a dozen New Yorkers, many of whom were trapped in their basement apartments. Still, several basement floors on Mrs. Moore’s block were flooded with two to three feet of sewage, costing these homeowners tens of thousands of dollars to clean and repair.

As their basements dry up, homeowners like the ones on this block of 37th Street in Brooklyn are starting to face a new reality. They live in homes built when sea levels were lower, in communities with old infrastructure and storm drainage systems that are poorly equipped to absorb the volume of water that comes with the rapidly changing climate. As the region prepares for wetter, stronger storms, homeowners are paying to support basements that are at the mercy of municipal sewer systems that haven’t been built for such attacks.

Fixes aren’t cheap or simple. Waterproofing a home with French sewers and a sump pump can cost an average of $10,000 to $20,000, with no guarantee that the improvements will work in extreme conditions. More aggressive solutions mean spending more money. Are you buying a second sump pump? Do you dig and seal the outside of the foundation? Do you raise your hands and move?

Waterproofing companies are overwhelmed with calls from crazy homeowners. Some say they book two to four months later and calls haven’t dwindled in the weeks since the storm.

“This is unprecedented. This is worse than Hurricane Sandy, which is the volume of calls we’ve received,” he said. boccia, a waterproofing and masonry company serving New York City and Long Island. In the past, a landlord might have said, “okay, I can handle this by wiping it down here and there.” You don’t wipe anymore – you need pumps, and that’s not every three years, but twice a year, three times a year.”

Home waterproofing solutions work by adding drains and pumps that allow water to flow away from a home. But a homeowner cannot control how water moves on the street or whether it flows properly underground.

“Storm water management in an urban setting like New York City is complex,” Edward Timbers, spokesman for the city’s Department of Environmental Protection, said in an email.

According to Mr Timbers, the number of sewer backups in the city has dropped 66 percent over the past decade “thanks to scheduled cleanup and aggressive responses to 311 reports.”

Calls to 311 included calls from 37th Street residents in August directing the city to clear any clogs in the sewer near the bottom of the block and eventually repair a break – business ending on September 3, two days after Ida had soaked the city. Mr Timbers suggested that homeowners install check valves in their sewer lines that can prevent water from returning to the home.

Since Hurricane Sandy in 2012, the city has invested $20 billion. climate resilience plan includes rainwater management. But studies so far have not been able to handle the rain that fell on the city on September 1 in record time.

That night, Lois Aronow, who lives on the same block as Ms. Moore on 37th Street, watched a waterfall spill over a concrete wall surrounding the Metropolitan Transportation Authority bus depot on Fifth Avenue. In the videos he took, water can be seen gushing over the wall and through the drainage holes. Two meters flooded the basement of the three-bedroom row house and destroyed a third of its living space. “I know it will happen again,” said Ms. Aronow, 62, the potter who has rented the house for five years.

Miss Aronow’s landlord has hired contractors to repair the damage and restore the property. But he’s worried about the long run. “This is traumatic. How do you operate?” said. “I guess you can move to a tall building, but moving is not without problems either.”

Ms. Moore is reluctant to renovate or waterproof her basement until she is convinced that the sewer problem has been adequately addressed. The check valve the previous owner installed broke during Hurricane Henri in late August. He estimates that the replacement could cost $5,000. And it could cost $30,000 to restore your basement. The homeowners insurance policy provides only $5,000 in coverage for damage caused by sewer backups.

Ms. Moore worries that because her house is at the top of the block, repairs to the city’s sewer at the bottom of the block won’t solve the problems for her. But repairs should fix problems all along the street, and city engineers inspected the sewer after Hurricane Ida and found it was working properly, according to Mr Timbers.

But Miss Moore is not to be trusted. “You think of your home as this safe place where you are and invest in it,” he said. “Now that this is all over, I think about our house completely differently, knowing how bad our house can get. I just feel like we’re at risk of damaging our own property. Our everything. I can never be okay when it starts to rain.”

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