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By: Jose Martinez
On the same day that a raging rainstorm soaked the city and crippled service on half the lines in the subway, a top state official quietly issued a damning audit, highly critical of the MTA’s readiness for future storms.
The 39-page “Risk Assessment and Implementation of Measures to Address Extreme Weather Conditions” report published Friday by the office of State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli rapped the MTA for a lack of preparedness on several fronts, saying the transit agency is years behind where it should be.
“To date, the MTA has not implemented one of the most important recommendations of the 2009 Blue Ribbon Commission’s Report — the development of the climate change adaptation master plan,” the report reads.
It states that the transit agency has run into delays on various projects designed to strengthen the system — and missed the mark on coming up with an overall resiliency plan by 2015, as the commission had called for six years earlier.
The report notes that the transit agency has done nearly $8 billion of federally funded resiliency work after Superstorm Sandy clobbered the transit system in 2012, causing billions of dollars of damage to tunnels, train yards, stations and other critical equipment. But it says the MTA’s climate action plan is not expected to be published until later this year, nearly a decade after it was due.
It doesn’t even seem to be on transit officials’ minds, according to the comptroller’s office.
“Despite all the time and resources that have been put into this Plan, none of the MTA officials we interviewed mentioned it,” DiNapoli’s report says.
Half-Done Jobs
The audit added that work needed to make six critical stations watertight and flood-resistant has been completed on just two of them — and that a project to keep flood water from entering 14 fan plants is also incomplete.
“While [New York City Transit] has developed winter, hurricane, rain and extreme heat plans, we found that these plans were inconsistently activated, with no documentation explaining the rationale for decision-making,” the report says.
The state comptroller’s audit was posted Friday afternoon, a spokesperson said. That was hours after flash flooding pounded the city and sent millions of gallons of rainwater cascading into underground stations during a storm that Gov. Kathy Hochul described as “Mother Nature at her most powerful.”
“This was the kind of rain that was once unimaginable — we called them once-in-a- century storms,” Hochul said Saturday. “But this is the third time since I was sworn in two years ago I’ve had a once-in-a-century storm.”
The Friday morning flash flood caused full or partial suspension of service on half the lines in the system, with MTA officials saying full service was restored by 8:30 p.m after 20 million gallons of water were pumped out of the subway.
MTA chairman and CEO Janno Lieber said Monday that damage from the subway soaking is still being assessed, but estimated to be in the “millions of dollars.”
“When you get that volume, that inundation, the problem is the city sewer system is only configured for about an inch and three quarters in an hour,” Lieber said during a “Good Day New York” appearance on Fox 5. “And we got, in many cases, two and a half inches — so gravity is going to do its thing.