BY JACK DELANEY | jdelaney@queensledger.com
WOODSIDE — Not long after Hurricane Ida inundated her Woodside home in September 2021, pouring four feet of water into her basement, Linda Carlson invited Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez inside to see the extent of the damage. The Congressmember surveyed the wreckage silently, and later committed to reporters that she would work to secure federal disaster relief funding.
“That’s just words right now,” Andrezeg Balczyk, a fellow Woodsider, told ABC at the time. “The promises could be empty… only time will tell.”
But the early signs were encouraging: FEMA did provide up to $34,000 in grants to affected residents, and the catastrophe prompted then-Mayor Bill de Blasio to allocate $2 billion in the next budget towards upgrading the city’s 7,500-mile network of sewers, stating that the hurricane had “created a new set of ground rules.”
Yet, five years later, Carlson is feeling dèja vu. Woodside flooded three times between July 18 and August 22 — Carlson, 74, traveled to Italy this summer, and returned to find nearly two feet of water in her basement (“I guess it’s only half as bad as last time,” she jokes). She lives alone, and estimates that the damages cost her roughly $10,000, along with destroying dozens of her original paintings.
Carlson isn’t the only one still picking up the pieces. Video footage from August shows rainwater rising above the license plates of parked cars on 48th Avenue, and interviews with more than 10 residents confirmed that the back-to-back floods have left the neighborhood increasingly desperate for a long-term fix.
So on Monday, September 14, over 100 Woodsiders gathered at St. Mary’s of Winfield Church for a town hall, hoping to ask elected officials and city reps a simple question: How could they ensure this doesn’t happen again?
Climate, Condos, and the BQE
For many locals, the answers didn’t necessarily inspire confidence.
As representatives for the Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) noted, climate change is exacerbating flooding throughout the city — a report this year by the nonprofit Rebuild by Design found that New York City is on track to spend $387 billion on climate resilience projects between 2012 to 2050, from overhauling sewers in Bushwick to installing flood gates in lower Manhattan.
But Woodside is particularly vulnerable to floods, despite being far from the coastline. “One of the challenges of your neighborhood is that you’re at a lower point, and all the water is converging here,” explained Tara Deighan, the DEP’s senior advisor for community affairs, at Monday’s meeting.
Residents of southern Woodside, especially around Calamus Avenue, have complained of severe flooding since at least the 1980s. Susan Porcelli, 52, grew up on Carlson’s block and remembers staring out into her front yard in horror one afternoon as a statue of Jesus was swallowed by the ground. (“Mom, why is Jesus going under the house?”) Down in the basement, a “volcano” of floodwater was spitting up tiles. Once the storm had passed, her father replaced their house’s aging foundations, which had been swept away, with concrete.
Even so, neighbors and officials alike agree that something has shifted in recent years. “We knew as kids that if you left your books or homework on the floor, they could get ruined. The flooding was maybe an inch or two — it looked like somebody dropped a bucket of water on the floor,” recalled Porcelli. “These past three floods, it was up to my knees.”
The situation reached an inflection point with Hurricane Ida, when a two-year-old and his parents, who lived one block down from Carlson and Porcelli on 65th Street, were found dead after becoming trapped in the basement of their home.
Last week’s forum reopened the fierce debate between community members and DEP ambassadors over the root causes of the neighborhood’s chronic flooding.
Several residents argued that the influx of multi-story condos in the area, most visibly on Queens Boulevard, was placing a greater strain on the sewage system. But Deighan downplayed those concerns: “I don’t think development is the major culprit,” she said, explaining that under the DEP’s unified stormwater rule, proposed buildings that eliminate previously porous surfaces must show how they plan to capture the resulting stormwater in order to receive a permit.
Other attendees singled out the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, which features a pumping station that diverts water from the highway into local sewers. The pump was installed in 2004, and has long drawn backlash — similar town halls at St Mary’s in 2007 and 2012 were both dominated by discussions about the role of the BQE in super-charging flooding.
Yet Jerry Fragias, director of field operations for the DEP’s Bureau of Water and Sewer Operation, shook his head.
“During high-intensity rain events, 500,000 gallons of water per minute comes from Maspeth and goes all the way up to LaGuardia Airport, where we have a sewer treatment plant at Bowery Bay,” said Fragias, who has lived in Woodside for the past 20 years. “That BQE pump? It adds 5,000 to 7,000 gallons per minute. It doesn’t contribute much right now, in terms of the problem.”
Instead, Fragias maintained that the only lasting solution would be to increase capacity by siphoning the flow from the main sewer with new pipes. He was cautious about making any commitments, however, given that the high density of underground infrastructure nearby — mainly subway tunnels and utility lines — prevents the DEP from “having a clear run up north,” leaving little room for a major project at the scale of Maspeth’s $106 million build-out in 2024.
“We Can’t Wait Anymore”
For Andy Yllanes, president of the Wynwoode Gardens Homeowners Association and the emcee for the night, the issue ultimately boils down to “sewer math.”
After the DEP team had presented, Yllanes pulled up a diagram of the various sewers beneath Woodside that feed into a 140-inch conduit to the Bowery Bay treatment plant: a 72-inch pipe on Queens Boulevard; the 18-inch pipe from the BQE; community sewers that eventually reach two 96-inch pipes at 69th Street; and an 85-inch pipe, also along 69th Street, that was installed in 2020.
“If the water just fell in our neighborhood, it would be fine,” said Yllanes. “That’s not our water, it’s water that’s coming from higher up. You have 367 inches of pipe going into a 140-inch one, and we are at the low end of that. The math is way off.”
Talk turned to how residents could push the city to relieve the area of some of that burden. Council Member Julie Won, who has represented Woodside since 2022, stressed the need for more media coverage and 311 calls, suggesting that officials were currently more focused on high-risk floodzones like Jamaica and the South Shore.
“When I got elected and had my first meeting with them,” Won said of DEP, “they showed me the entire map of the city and told me, ‘You’re crying, but look at how many other people are getting flooded, and it’s to a greater degree than your district. So you’ll have to wait.’”
“But we can’t wait anymore,” concluded Won. “Because it’s getting worse and worse.”
Once the meeting ended, attendees milled about to debrief. While few locals believed a silver bullet was on its way, some cautiously wondered whether developers could be pressured to help solve issues like ponding, when pools of rainwater linger for weeks or months. And could the state offer greater financial assistance — maybe a tax rebate, or credit on water bills?
Porcelli, who was sick and stayed home, offered a more fatalistic perspective on a problem that has plagued her community for decades and personally cost her tens of thousands of dollars. If the city offered to buy out her property, as it has in neighborhoods like Hollis, Kissena Park, and The Hole through a program called “Resilient Acquisitions,” she would likely say yes.
“I don’t think there’s a fix in my lifetime,” she explained, grimly. “I really don’t.”
For information about filing a flood insurance claim, visit fema.gov/flood-insurance. To learn more about filing a claim for property damage with the NYC Comptroller’s office, which must be done within 90 days of the incident, visit comptroller.nyc.gov/services/for-the-public/claims/faqs/natural-disaster-catastrophe-property-damage-faqs/.
