“I’d been checking everything,” DeVito, 63, said on Thursday. “And I happened to say to my wife, I said — it was a small amount of water — I said, ‘Ann, if you want to double-check downstairs’ — I’ve been checking for years with all these weather conditions — I said, ‘Just take a peek.’ ”
“She went to step on the top step, she heard, like, a creak, a noise,” DeVito said. “Before she knew the stairs went like that.”
He lifted his arm so that it was horizontal. The stairs to his basement had started to float on the surface of several feet of water and sewage that had poured into his house through broken basement windows. Luckily for his wife, she was still on the first floor when it happened.
DeVito told me this story outside of his home on Dryden Court, a short dead-end street of modest homes tucked behind a grocery store and a small shopping center with a Michael’s and a Party City. He and his neighbor, Dom Rogo, 52, were marveling at the scale of the damage done around them. On one side, a family pumping six feet of water out of the basement that doubled as a bedroom; there, the bed floated to the ceiling like a boat. On the other, the homeowner, Masie Lam, 50, had enlisted others to help clear out a basement that, like DeVito’s, had flooded thanks to a broken window. On Monday, a number of personal belongings were securely stored on the lowest level of her house. On Thursday, they were on the curb in garbage bags, sodden and ruined. Lam hoped that the Sanitation Department would pick them up; if not, then what? Her neighbors had dumpsters in place, something Lam couldn’t afford.
It didn’t take long to realize that the residents of Dryden Court were used to their post-Ida predicament, both in the specific effects and the general response. On the specifics, multiple people who lived on the street explained that the flooding had gotten worse, happening at least three times in the past few weeks.
You also get the sense that the residents of Dryden Court are used to figuring out how to rely on themselves, on their families and on each other, instead of having problems like raw sewage overflowing into their houses being remedied by the people who are supposed to remedy such things.
Finding Dryden Court on a map is far easier if you use a map of flood zones. It sits inland from the northern boundary of Staten Island, but only slightly above sea level. So on a flood map you simply follow the boundaries of Flood Zone A south from the top of the island until it ends as a little bulb about three-quarters of a mile from the shore. That bulb sits just south of Dryden Court.
According to the Federal Emergency Management Administration, Zone A regions are expected to flood about once every century. Dryden Court has flooded twice in the past month.
The immediate question is why. What, beyond geography, makes this particular place so prone to flooding and what has made it so prone to flooding recently?
Many of those interviewed this week were in the area when Hurricane Sandy arrived in 2012, but what’s happening now has had a much more pervasive effect.
Rogo believes that changes made after Sandy were partly responsible.
“We have a storm sewer and a waste sewer behind us, two six-foot, six-inch sewers behind us,” Rogo said. “It seems that they tied a lot of water from Westerleigh” — a more upscale neighborhood to the south — “from Sandy into this new sewer system and bringing us more water.” This information came from a Department of Environmental Protection worker at the time that the work was being done, he said. (In an email to The Washington Post, a DEP spokesman could only identify a drainage upgrade in the area back in 2003.)
“Now you’re seeing the storm sewer explode with water and then flood out the street here in this area,” Rogo continued. “Whereas before we used to just get runoff from the street, now we’re actually getting flooded from the actual sewer itself.”
That was what everyone on the street said had happened. Eighteen-year-old Hashir Raja, who was drying out his car after it was submerged during the storm, explained that the flooding was a function of the drains “pumping out water.” Marion Murphy, 54 — DeVito’s neighbor whose basement bedroom flooded — said that she took video of the water coming up out of the sewer. With rain coming down and sewage coming up, water levels rose. In Raja’s case, it meant that his car floated away from the curb. In Murphy’s it meant that cracks in the foundation and other gaps let the water seep into a lower point: the lower floor of her house. For hours.
“It just didn’t stop,” she said. “It was like a waterfall.”
At the far end of the street, Chris Osrio, 37, had spent the morning gutting his mother’s basement. Her house is slightly higher than the others on the block so while the street flooded regularly, the basement didn’t. Her house had a check valve, a device added to a wastewater line meant to ensure that it flows only one way. The storm this week, though “blew the check valve off,” Osrio said.
His mother’s house stands next to the chain-link fence that truncates Dryden Court. You could see how high the water was by looking at the detritus it left clinging to the fence, about three feet above the ground. Between the fence and Osrio’s mother’s house were the expunged contents of its basement, down to the ruined drywall.
“Lost the boiler, the water heater, probably $20,000, $30,000 in damage, easily,” Osrio said. “Not even counting, you know, personal stuff because I know they” — insurers — “don’t care about that.”
But his mother was lucky; she had insurance. Marion Murphy doesn’t; she and her family were renting the property. Masie Lam doesn’t either — because of the flooding.
“We have so many flooded basements, they canceled our insurance,” she said. “They don’t want to renew it.”
Insurance costs are often the way we measure the damage from a storm, but those values are macrocosmic and incomplete. We also measure damage in lives taken, an important and tragic measure but also one that doesn’t adequately cover the scale of the effects. Like: Where’s Marion Murphy’s son going to sleep? Like: How is Masie Lam going to pay to fix her basement?
What about something as simple as the stress the flooding caused on people like the McCanns, who live in a house opposite Dryden Court? Dan McCann, 32, rushed back home from Manhattan during the storm on Wednesday night, navigating flooded or crowded streets as his pregnant wife giving him increasingly urgent updates on the flooding over the phone. He arrived to discover the basement flooded. He led his wife through the water and sewage to his car, carrying his 90-pound dog, wondering if the floodwaters would reach his electrical box and spark a fire. How do you measure that? And how do you measure the fear of it happening again?
Rogo and DeVito both bought their houses three decades ago. DeVito’s lived on Dryden Court since 1987. He raised his family there. And given his practiced reaction to reports of rain, it’s clear that he’s uncertain what comes next.
“It got worse,” he said of the flooding since he moved in.
“Much worse,” Rogo added. “It got a lot worse over the years.”
“Unless the rains are more heavier,” DeVito said.
“It could be more rain,” Rogo added. “It used to flood at eight inches, before Sandy. Now we seem to be flooding at two inches.”
DeVito agreed. During Hurricane Irene in 2011, there was seven inches of rain over the course of several hours and he wound up with two inches of water in his basement. After Ida, it rained slightly more much faster — and his basement stairs floated to the ceiling.
He recognized one likely culprit.
“Looking at it, they say climate change,” he said of what he’d seen reported. “It’s true” — and it is. Warmer temperatures mean more rapid evaporation and warmer air holds more water. Warmer oceans mean more powerful hurricanes. All of that means that the remnants of a major hurricane that landed in Louisiana could deluge an island 1,300 miles away.
“I couldn’t believe what I saw,” DeVito marveled. “They said nine inches of rain on Staten Island!”
But it isn’t only climate change. It’s also an area prone to flooding that hasn’t yet been bolstered against the increased frequency of major storms or higher sea levels. It’s a neighborhood that might be the unintended victim of an effort to protect a nearby neighborhood where property values and incomes are a bit higher. It could simply be a place drowned because of a bad decision — neighbors heard rumors about a closed valve that contributed to flooding a few weeks ago — or because of bad luck.
What Dryden Court is the sort of place where the undramatic effects of the changing climate play out. No one died and no buildings collapsed; the damage encompassed maybe a dozen or two homes. But how many places like this are there, pushed lower onto the list of things that need to be fixed because it wasn’t a tragedy and because it’s tucked out of sight?
Addressing climate change will cost trillions of dollars over the long term. It will also have costs that are never measured, calculable only by going through garbage dumps and finding the bags of sewage-soaked heirlooms that people had no choice but to give up.
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