Flood preparation in New York City

AccuWeather

Zachary Iscol, Commissioner of New York City Emergency Management, joined AccuWeather Early to discuss how the city is ensuring the safety of its transportation networks and deploying life safety crews in preparation for the tropical rainstorm moving up the East Coast.

Transcript

00:00So how is the commute looking this morning? Any flooding or transit impacts that you're noticing

00:04right now? There are some transit impacts around the city. Nothing overly significant. You know,

00:10but as you guys were saying, I mean, the big concern with this weather event is the high

00:14winds, the coastal flooding. The rain is going to be more of a nuisance prolonged over this,

00:19you know, the two, three day event. Hopefully it'll be clearing up tomorrow. But also just

00:23want to say a lot of really incredible work going into this event by the men and women

00:27who serve the city working through the long weekend to make sure that we are serving the

00:31public, preparing infrastructure, making sure our transportation networks are safe, staging life

00:36safety crews around the city. So really appreciative of all the work that goes into an event like this.

00:41Now, where are the conditions worse across the city and where are you focusing your resources as

00:47the winds and then the tidal flooding increases later today? Yeah, it's a great question. So

00:53number one is always public safety, right? So we have life safety crews, high axle vehicles,

00:59tow trucks staged around the city from FDNY and NYPD. And then the biggest concern with this event

01:05being high winds and then the coastal flooding. We have our eye on the third tide cycle of this

01:11event later this afternoon in sort of like New York Harbor, in and around Jamaica Bay, the Rockaways,

01:17parts of Brooklyn and Queens. And then also just a lot of concerns about downed trees. So we have,

01:22you know, folks from our parks department, sanitation department ready to take calls and

01:27then address any tree issues that we have around the city. And then also would be remiss if I didn't

01:32mention some of the infrastructure and utility issues. So Con Ed, PSC and G have some additional

01:37crews out there to deal with those downed power lines, power outages around the city. So not any one

01:42thing, but really looking at this, what are the impacts of that coastal flooding and the high winds

01:46and how do we holistically address it from all of our agency partners?

01:50Yeah, seems very prepared. All right. As always, flooding is a danger, a serious danger for people

01:54in basement apartments or flood prone low lying areas. What should they be thinking about and doing

01:59right now? Yeah. So number one is, is have a plan, have a plan, make sure that you're monitoring the

02:06forecast, sign up for notify NYC. You know, we always say knowing is half the battle. Make sure you sign up

02:11for our public emergency notification system. We actually have a group dedicated just to basements.

02:17You can sign up by texting notify to 692692 by calling 311 or by downloading the app in the app store.

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