New York City Plans to Hire a Private Forecaster Following Ida's Impact

Hiring a private weather forecaster is among the plans New York City wants to execute.

NYC also plans on making more drainage features available and issuing warnings very early and in a more aggressive way to residents under a new plan in response to torrential rainfall like the life-threatening flood which Hurricane Ida brought to the city at the beginning of the month.

Ida's Impact

Not less than 50 people from Virginia to Connecticut and also 13 in New York City, lost their lives this month when Ida's remnants flooded the Northeast.

Water from the rain left hundreds of cars stuck on submerged waterways, flooded subway stations, interrupted the movement of trains, and flooded basement apartments, making them dangerous traps.

When the storm was very intense, it dropped 8 centimeters (3.15 inches) of rain within one hour over New York City, overwhelming an old sewer system whose work is to handle approximately half of that.

At a virtual news conference on Monday, Mayor Bill de Blasio said: "We learned from Ida that we have to do some very very different things. This is a brand new world."

The Second Opinion

The city plans on employing a private weather forecasting service so that there will be a "second opinion" for the city that add-on predictions from National Weather Service and provides storms' forecast for a specific neighborhood, as per the Democratic mayor's plan.

De Blasio reveals that the work of the National Weather Service is good and important, but most of the time its reports were not too clear or very late and something more urgent is needed.

He compared it to the city making its personal counterterrorism and intelligence division in the Police Department of New York City following 9/11 attacks from terrorists.

After the storm struck the region, de Blasio said he had been given a prediction that the city would witness between 7.5 to 15 cm or 3 to 6 inches of rain for the day and not 3 inches within an hour.

Improvement of Local Preparedness for Extreme Weather

In a statement, the National Weather Service said that it accepted the plan of New York City. It also called it a helpful step by adding more expertise and capacity that may have a better understanding of local nuances and can be based on the support NWS brings.

The agency said: "We support any coordinated effort by any organization, business or government to improve local preparedness for extreme weather and water events."

The city will also combine its effort together with community groups to knock on the doors of people inhabiting basement apartments to give them warning that has to do with flooding threats and to identify safeguarded evacuation spaces close to them.

Out of the 13 people in the city who lost their lives to the storm, not less than 11 of them were in basement apartments that were flooded, as per police.

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