Flooding has been a persistent threat to homes in Ralph Martinez’s neighborhood, but the worst he’s ever seen was in 2021 during Hurricane Ida. Water was coming into the basement floor of his Bronx brownstone through the windows and up through the drains.
“It got so bad, I think it was up to my knee level of water,” Martinez said. “The fridge was floating.”
Martinez, a 30-year-old high school counselor, lives a few blocks from Yankee Stadium in the Bronx, close to – but not on – the Harlem River. His basement was one of many that flooded during Ida in New York City, a disaster that took the lives of 11 people who drowned in basements during the storm.
Communities along New York’s shorelines and many waterways rely on accurate federal flood maps to best assess their current and future flood risk to build long-term solutions. For the Federal Emergency Management Agency to produce accurate federal flood maps, they need the most up-to-date climate and ocean research and modeling from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which studies and models changes in the climate, ocean and weather.
2024’s presidential election will determine the level of investment in NOAA over the next four years, as well as how the agency addresses risks posed by climate change. That informs the local public policy designed to protect New Yorkers, and ultimately has an impact on how much information communities vulnerable to storms like Ida will have to help them prepare as the floodwaters rise.
