On a baking hot day in July, I took the 2 train to the 116th Street station at Malcolm X Boulevard in Harlem. The station’s name shone from the wall on ocean-blue tile, along with glass mosaics of jazz musicians and civil rights leaders. The place looked, unsurprisingly, a little worn; paint was flaking around a gash in the subceiling and off some of the green platform columns, and the Langston Hughes mosaic panel was stained brown from dripping water. Water also glimmered in the tracks, mixed with trash. I was there to meet some of the top construction executives for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the entity that runs the subways, to see what it would take to floodproof the system.
The 116th Street station was shipwrecked during Hurricane Ida in 2021, which dumped a record-breaking 7 to 9 inches of rain across the city — a total liquid weight of some 160 million tons. Sheets of water from the ceiling cascaded onto one of the platforms — engulfing the green columns, obscuring some of that mosaic tile and drowning the tracks below. If the water hadn’t been dirty and underground, it might have looked like a water park attraction, the trains like logs speeding through a flume. The water came down from air vents cut into the sidewalk, which became funnels when enough water gathered on the surface.
The station is among the oldest and most flood-prone in the city. The area’s former state senator — and later New York governor — David Paterson remembers it being a problem zone as far back as the late 1970s. “If you wanted to start working out, and you wanted to maybe do some swimming, all you had to do was go to 116th Street-Lenox Avenue,” Paterson told me. “By the time you got to the bottom of the stairs, you’d be immersed in water.”
The conditions of the station’s construction explain why subway flooding is so hard to stop. More than 120 years ago, the first portions of the transit system were built mostly by hand. The Manhattan schist bedrock was hard and expensive to cut through, so stations like 116th Street were formed in shallow trenches — meaning that rain never had to travel very deep to cause chaos. Water periodically seeped up from below too, as tunnel workers uncovered ancient underground streams while excavating; since then, holes have been periodically plugged and patched with concrete and grout. Again and again, the M.T.A. has been forced to jury-rig solutions.
Even as construction technology advanced over the years, these problems persisted. The subway was largely locally funded for decades, predating the strong 20th-century federal government that opened its checkbook for more-modern mass transit in Washington and San Francisco. Cue eternal financial issues, which breed political and operational ones. Underground, there is always something else to fix.
Unfortunately, the city is no longer dealing just with the usual water challenges of the past century. The rain has become worse — a lot worse. That’s a function of New York’s changing climate, now considered a humid subtropical zone. Hotter air brings bigger and quicker deluges — known as cloudbursts — which more regularly overwhelm the sewers and turn into floods. New Yorkers know that this isn’t the rain of their youth, and the numbers bear it out. In the past year alone, the city has experienced multiple summer flooding events bigger than any New York had seen since 2021. So far in 2026, the city’s flash-flood emergency plan has been activated more than a quarter of the time. Louise Yeung, the city’s chief climate officer, calls torrential rain our “new climate reality.”
It’s the subway that suffers. In the last 20 years, at least 200 of the system’s 472 stations have been “impacted by one or more of these torrential rainfall events,” according to the M.T.A.’s climate resilience road map. New Yorkers have filmed so many viral videos of water rushing down stairs or next to subway doors that they’ve become a recognizable social media genre. There will only be more; already this year, clips circulated of a soaked subway car, a tree impaling a northbound 4 train, and a woman being swept away while trying to lunge off a bus.
Rain is a sneaky kind of climate threat: regular, low-grade, sloshing discomfort at your shins that becomes hazardous if allowed to rise. When it rains in New York, water is supposed to flow into the sewers, via openings along the curb, and through 7,500 miles of pipes out into processing plants or the sea. But many of the pipes can handle only around 1.5 inches of rain an hour; more than that, and water accumulates on the street and searches for a different way down. The subway obliges — it has more than 47,000 openings.
At 116th Street, I went aboveground to meet Jamie Torres-Springer, the M.T.A.’s president of construction and development, and Eric Wilson, senior vice president for climate and land use planning within the M.T.A.’s construction and development team. The intersection was busy with delivery bikers, fast food spots and people trying to sell something — the kind of activity that tends to scatter during a storm. Torres-Springer and Wilson brought me to the southwestern corner entrance to observe the most obvious opening to the underground: the stairs, which the city has been trying to rainproof. There, commuters going down to catch the train now first step up onto what is essentially a concrete platform, and then descend. This small elevation is a surprisingly crucial seven-inch barrier that can stop water from surging down the stairs.
Another kind of opening is offered by the subway’s many air vents, used instead of air-conditioning — also a consequence of 19th-century engineering. Shallow pans sit a few feet below the vents to catch and drain water while still letting air in — at 116th Street, I saw a rat scamper through the gap. Today, those pans are regularly inundated, and the M.T.A. sometimes makes do by covering the vents with grimy yellow mats. Torres-Springer humbly called them a “low-tech solution.”
The transit system’s 2025-29 capital plan allocated $223 million for light-touch subway protections like these. And at 116th Street, they seem to be helping: After $1.4 million of work, a spokeswoman said the M.T.A. hadn’t seen flooding at the station since they were implemented. Elevated steps or vents have been added to a few dozen others, with similar mitigations planned for an additional 100.
But these tweaks are small, and if they fail, the results could be grim. Transit experts who think about subway flooding often reference the 2021 Zhengzhou metro disaster, in which water trapped people in train cars and rose up to their chests. Multiple people drowned. New York City’s transit system has so far escaped that nightmare scenario, but there are always opportunities for mayhem and injuries, given that six inches of moving water can knock riders off their feet. The subway is full of sharp edges and freakish accidents on good days. It is creaky and old like Paris’s and London’s, systems that are also water-vulnerable — and even those don’t have New York’s “confluence of risks,” as Wilson pointed out. “We’re a coastal city,” he said, and “we’re a riverine city.”
Five years after Ida, the M.T.A. has not yet made protective changes to more than half of the system’s flood-prone stations. All the while, the rain continues to fall.
New York City has been preoccupied with the destructive potential of water for years, but the fear was water from the sea rather than the sky. Every subway worker, after all, has a story from Hurricane Sandy, which forced thousands to evacuate, shuttered the stock exchange and, overall, did $19 billion worth of damage in 2012. It was “the big one,” in the words of James Rudolph, a retired transit cop. With power entirely down for days across Lower Manhattan, transit officers got air down to their underground headquarters at Canal Street by leaving the door open. “The rats were having a field day,” Rudolph says. “They were running in and running out.”
Karen Grigoryan, now the subway’s superintendent for hydraulics, spent days after the storm trying to avoid breathing diesel fumes while struggling to pump seawater out of various subway tubes. He operated a special train with portable pumps and hoses to funnel the water up and out of the tunnel. And it was all hands on deck; he couldn’t leave. “I had to stay at work around the clock and pump the water,” he remembers. He was still stuck underground when his son was born en route to the hospital in an ambulance.
Biju Varughese normally did train repair work underneath cars in the enormous 207th Street yard, home to an overhaul shop and a resting place for off-duty A and C trains. That day, though, the space where he and some 550 people usually worked was completely flooded. Varughese showed up, but he could see only with a flashlight. Outside, the whole 62-track yard was a waterway, too, an extension of the Harlem River that had overwhelmed a bare-bones fence. “It was like hell,” he said.
The devastation of Sandy initiated a colossal building and rebuilding spree in New York. Engineers mapped out mammoth coastal defense projects, some of which are still in progress, like a 19-foot-high Staten Island sea wall. Others are fully or partly in place, like the long portions of the Lower Manhattan coast being raised or protected by the East Side Coastal Resiliency project.
And little expense was spared: Senator Chuck Schumer’s office called the influx the “largest federal revitalization of New York infrastructure since Robert Moses.” The M.T.A. alone got more than $6 billion, which covered big coastal projects, rehabilitated tunnels and helped protect stations and infrastructure from storm surge, taking years to spend down. (Sandy’s damage was also measurably severe, leading Congress to pass a stand-alone relief bill.)
Nine years later, though, before a lot of this construction was finished, Ida reached the southern edge of New York City. It was merely a post-tropical cyclone by then, but it made a mess of the rush-hour commute. On the streets, the pavement seemed to disappear. Rosa Almonte was driving a city bus on Queens Boulevard at the end of a 10-hour shift when she realized that water had risen up to the seats; her passengers tried to find places to perch above it. Almonte felt the bus moving, and not by her wheel.
But the bigger problems were below ground. Water flowed into basement apartments, where 11 people died. And it cascaded easily into the subway. Rushing water shot down station steps, white horses stampeding to catch an uptown express. It was a sight that would, many times, be likened to Niagara Falls, including by Bryan Roman, a 1 train operator, who approached the rapids along flooded tracks. “It looked like something exploded,” he told The City Reporter.
The two storms — and the ways to protect against them — were very different. Sandy’s vengeance from below was brutal, 14-foot surges of waves and corroding salt, but the weak points were obvious, and concentrated along the coast. Even though Ida wasn’t as financially destructive, it highlighted a host of new danger zones across the city, because rain can fall inland as easily as waterside. All the post-Sandy work to fortify against surge along New York’s 520 miles of coast wasn’t much help. Congress sent less money to the M.T.A. for recovery — a lot less, on the order of tens of millions instead of billions. That meant that the agency was harder pressed for cash to protect itself from the new threat, one that appears to be hitting more often than Sandy-style hurricanes. The current and future weather reality is Ida — again and again.
7 New York City Subway Zones That Experience Chronic Flooding
This is what brought me to 116th Street. It’s a station the M.T.A. likes to point to when explaining why it needs money. The problem is the pumping facility, located off the southbound platform — and nearly as ancient as the whole subway system. It was built during World War I and hasn’t been rehabbed since Reagan invaded Grenada. There are 286 geriatric pump rooms like it throughout the underground. All together, they help flush out 13 million gallons of subterranean water on a normal day. But when it storms, the pumps face tens of millions more.
The M.T.A. executives and I entered the space, about the size of an average New York City apartment bedroom, through a door across from the turnstiles. The room holds a giant sump pit, which is where water is supposed to drain when it falls onto the subway tracks. From the pit, four pumps push the water out into the sewage system. Two of these pumps operate pneumatically and are capable of only around half the 500-gallons-per-minute pace of their two electric partners. The old equipment has to be inspected monthly, sometimes more before rainstorms. Workers sign a faded logbook whose cover says “Record” in a blocky typeface that might have seemed bureaucratic in the 1920s.
Clearly, the mediocre mechanics are a weakness in our current era of heavy rain. It was a cloudless day, but there was still a trickle of water flowing into the sump pit — a reminder of all the liquid already underground. I looked from the pit to the tangle of discolored bare piping that is supposed to manage much more. Wilson, the climate guru, clocked my glance. “Kind of steampunk,” he said later.
The M.T.A. has allocated $477 million to rehabilitate 14 pump rooms like this, which is a relatively large sum in capital planning. But a lot of the system’s pumping power is still living in the past.
“Our whole goal is to keep the runoff from coming in as much as possible to protect this,” Wilson said, gesturing around the narrow little room. “This is our line of defense.”
Wilson spent much of his life adjacent to climate issues — growing up amid drought and wildfire in Colorado, and spending almost four years in the 1990s in the Peace Corps on Savai’i, an island in Samoa that had just been stunned by a hurricane. But he didn’t start focusing on climate work until he moved to New York City, where he jumped around different parts of city bureaucracy before landing on a project in Edgemere, a neighborhood in Queens that had been overwhelmed by Sandy’s waves. He moved into climate mitigation full time. That included work on preventing basement deaths, the kind caused by Ida — a storm that he said brought home how “all of the city was truly built for a different weather regime.”
Hence the need for new pumps. I went with Wilson to inspect one of the rooms that have received the Sandy-era upgrades. We left the Reagan era and rode uptown to 147th Street, where we climbed up above the coastal flood plain into a new pump control room that serves the 2 train tunnel far below. There we found the pump master, Grigoryan — whose son was born in the Sandy aftermath — looking proudly over gleaming screens and tubes.
“You can smile to the camera right here,” Grigoryan said, pointing a lens that allows him to monitor the room from Brooklyn most of the time.
Wilson also took me 60 blocks north to see another Sandy-era project: the extensive updating of the 207th Street train yard on the banks of the Hudson. More than a decade after the yard was completely flooded, paralyzing the lives of workers like the repairman Varughese, its reconstruction was fully completed in 2024. Wilson and I walked a stretch of its length. It has the scale of an airport. Along its riverside border is a 1,600-foot sea wall, made of steel pipes 85 feet long embedded deep in the ground. The dozens of tracks are new. Fastened to one side of the tunnel mouth through which trains head into service is a rolled-up floodgate, made of a Kevlar-like fabric developed by a NASA contractor that can be stretched to block water from coastal floods.
Post-Sandy construction like this is on a different scale than station steps and vents. These are projects that involved teams of engineers, contractors and workers — career-defining stuff that took prodigious human effort and organization to pull off. Such work within and around New York infrastructure is also incredibly inconvenient. The 207th Street yard, for example, can’t be taken out of service — some 20 trains leave and enter every day — so tracks could be replaced only in sections. Similar staging is necessary anytime the M.T.A. replaces a signal, let alone rebuilds a tunnel. The system runs 24/7 and is relied on daily by millions.
The train yard project has been fairly successful; no storm has breached that new sea wall. And some of these coastal defenses are helpful against the current threat of heavy rain — the new tracks in the 207th Street yard were planted over a geotextile subsurface fabric that doesn’t erode. The new pump setup is protected and can help the system bounce back quickly.
But other resiliency changes on which the M.T.A. spent big are not fixing the city’s current threat of heavy rain; the Sandy-era fabric gate for the A-train tunnel has never been used outside of drills, and that kind of technology isn’t very effective at closing subway openings off from quick, shifting cloudbursts. M.T.A. leaders talk often about “multihazards,” how a host of climate horrors will shape the subway. This summer, some of the city’s flash floods occurred after extreme heat or days of wildfire smoke from Canada that hovered uneasily over New York. Those forces test the subway, too. Covering sidewalk vents with heavy mats may keep water out, but should be “temporary,” Wilson says, while people like him work toward more complicated architectural solutions. Covered vents mean less circulation — and more heat.
Leaders of many transit systems try not to get stuck only chasing the last disaster. It’s why the M.T.A. is piloting heat-capture tools to make platforms cooler, and why the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which runs the PATH train between New Jersey and Manhattan, is working on understanding what heat can do to the system’s metal components. And every change must do no harm. “You have to actually be thinking through that you aren’t creating additional risk when you do things,” says Kathryn Garcia, executive director of the Port Authority.
Hence the panoply of tiny changes. Wilson says that shoring up infrastructure can amount to “a little bit of a Whac-a-Mole.” The year before, “there were just new vulnerabilities exposed with almost every storm.”
Every rainstorm, then, brings another crossroads moment for a system as complex as the subway, in a city as complex as New York. The beleaguered trains have weathered water for 120 years, and their billions of riders expect service as usual even as the deluge gets worse. Storms aren’t excuse enough for delays in a system that has run nonstop since a Civil War general’s son served as the mayor. So the strategies must be invisible, and they must work. Those are the marching orders. Alexander Kemp, the administrative vice president of T.W.U. Local 100, the transit workers’ union, has a more pessimistic battlefield description of the small tweaks that hold everything together. He calls them “Band-Aids on bullet wounds.”
The most obvious way to prevent subway floods would be to greatly expand the capacity of the sewer system — to rebuild its vast network to withstand more inches of rain in a short time. In crude terms, bigger pipes and openings would mean fewer impromptu ponds on the street or in train stations. Such expansion would be far beyond even the scale of the Pharaonic projects undertaken after Sandy, requiring debilitating street closures and rooting around in places where the underground is a web of tubing. One city estimate found that building a separate storm-sewer system capable of withstanding an Ida would cost more than $250 billion and take from 50 to 100 years to build. Just shoring up chronic priority areas could run $30 billion. The city has been enhancing or adding sewers in some places since Ida, including a 2025 investment of $390 million to replace and upgrade three miles of sewers and catch basins around Bushwick, Brooklyn. But over multiple mayoral administrations, full re-sewering has been a distant dream.
In lieu of titanic sewers, cities have sometimes tried more creative ways to move or hold water. In Tokyo (where subway platforms are air-conditioned), excess water is pumped to giant tanks. Copenhagen, a model for New York and global “sponge cities” inspired by the landscape architect Kongjian Yu, installs park lawns over underground retention chambers. New York is experimenting with such “blue-green infrastructure” capabilities, including natural drainage in Staten Island, porous pavement and a sunken basketball court at the South Jamaica Houses, in Queens, where water drains to tanks that can be siphoned slowly. More of this is on the way.
For now, the city, like the M.T.A., plays Whac-a-Mole with old infrastructure, trying to prevent clogs. One sunny Friday in mid-July, I went to Sunset Park, Brooklyn, to visit a catch basin in the street — the hole in the ground next to a curb grate, where water collects and then flows to sewer pipes, as long as nothing’s blocked. The city has more than 150,000 of these basins, some of which are being modernized to let in more water and keep out more trash. New York is also buying more specialized trucks to keep the holes clean.
Brian Medina, a worker from the city’s Department of Environmental Protection, was working that day. He wrestled a manhole cover out of the ground and used a crane and claw on his truck to pull up gunk. (I saw cups, half-eaten snack bars and a lot of mud, but the claws sometimes nab guns, knives and rats.) The claw hid the goo, but its foul fecal smell — a mix of dog poop and cooking oil, according to D.E.P. workers — still alarmed pedestrians, who hustled by. Medina kept hauling it out, and the claw dropped the gunk into the truck bed. During a storm, he said, he knows he’s cleaned enough when he can see a whirlpool — water going down.
Yet another summer rainstorm was expected the coming weekend. When a flash flood advisory goes into effect, workers like Medina inspect the 1,000 most problematic basins and often return once the flooding has started. Medina told me he was knee-deep in water during a storm two weeks before. And sure enough, two days after I visited him, the predicted deluge began.
In Brooklyn it happened quickly. Within an hour, some catch basins were already overflowing, beginning the watery search for an opening downstream. I biked through the wet to the R station at 4th Avenue and 9th Street, which has a history of flooding. People stared at the water trickling onto the tracks, but a high vent kept most of it out. Thirty minutes later, the local skies were clear.
Queens, however, was drowning. Flash floods overtook the E train platform at Court Square, where a construction project seems to have weakened water barriers. People slogged with annoyance or disgust through ponds, their commutes at best a mess — a new normal that requires a Plan B, as for the security guard I once spoke to who paid $100 for a surge-priced Uber to get home when his stop was underwater. In Jackson Heights, one subway entrance went viral for the veritable waterfall it had become. It was almost beautiful, at least until the camera panned to the swamped station.
The M.T.A. would later report flooding in 17 locations around the city, none of which had full mitigations in place. The 116th Street station seemed to weather the storm. Speaking to reporters, Janno Lieber, the M.T.A.’s chairman, said the weather was a strain on M.T.A. workers. He had made a similar comment a couple of weeks before, when workers pulled 12-to-14 hour shifts in weather Lieber said was “like the 10 plagues” — dangerous heat, and then heavy rain.
Subway flooding is not a problem with an easy solution waiting in the wings. As time goes on — and as the climate of New York City is projected to approach that of Birmingham, Ala., by 2050 — challenges could overlap and compound. Beyond destruction and passenger risk, what’s at stake is simply a ridable transit system, which is itself crucial if New York is to be a more climate-friendly city. Trains, after all, keep people out of gas-guzzling cars.
In lieu of patching up every leak in the system, there might be other paths to equilibrium. The subway could even become a cushion in times of watery disaster. Daniel Zarrilli, the city’s former chief climate policy adviser, recently jumped on the 2/3 line hours after one of these cloudbursts. He marveled at the system’s resiliency. If the pumping and bounce-back capabilities got even better, perhaps it’s not “the worst thing in the world for some of that excess water to go into the subway,” he said — for water to divide itself more efficiently among the passageways of our monumental underground labyrinth, leaving less to pool on streets or drown people in basement apartments.
Perhaps the subway’s future, and our future, will be one of living with water — in which we nudge it a little and help it move among our ruins. The subway has always been a patchwork and a compromise; not quite enough, but entirely essential. The system evolves through little change after little change. Perhaps climate risks are the kind of problem, as Wilson put it to me as we sped downtown on the 1 train, that “we’re just going to be working on now and forever.”
Mark Chiusano is the author of “The Fabulist: The Lying, Hustling, Grifting, Stealing and Very American Legend of George Santos” and “Marine Park.”
Video by Hilary Swift for The New York Times.
