BAYSIDE, Queens (PIX11)– When 6.35 inches of rain falls in a roughly two-hour stretch on a neighborhood that usually sees about 4 inches of rainfall per month, the result is the type of flooding that leaves many parts of this neighborhood under feet of stormwater.
The result of Thursday afternoon’s deluge was scenes on Friday of residents and businesses cleaning up and draining out in ways that were difficult, time-consuming, and, in some cases, smelly.
The intersection of Northern and Bell Boulevards was the center of the rainstorm that ended up flooding most of an area that’s one-and-a-half miles long and about one-quarter of a mile wide. Parked at that junction is Souvlaki King, one of the most popular food trucks in Queens. John Amanatidis owns the business.
“I’m 36 years in NYC,” he said, “and I’ve never seen something like that, in my life.”
He was talking about the floodwaters that were thigh-high around his truck, leaving it surrounded, boat-like, in the storm. The water rose as high as the truck’s generator.
On Friday, Amanatidis and his crew spent the morning drying out the generator. They were able to open late for lunch hour, but both they and their customers kept talking about Thursday’s flood.
“To me from here,” said Despina Amanatidis, the food truck manager, and John’s daughter, “everything looked like a river.”
The heavy rains she described from Thursday left most of the businesses around her food truck shuttered on Friday. At the public library, the bank, and the drugstore that are within a block of the truck, clean up crews were using industrial dryers and other tools to try and get the buildings back to normal. At the White Castle across the street, another crew was pumping out the flooded basement.
Farther down the street, a manhole cover was still blown out of its hole, with sludge and other slowly drying waste spilling out of it. The sheer volume of water the day before had caused the damage, and the stench was intense.
It was one of many things in the Bayside neighborhood that still needed to be set right again on Friday.
Another of those things was Cristian Ojeda’s sedan. Despite the fact that he’d stripped its insides down to the chassis to try and dry it out, he and his cousin, who were both tinkering with the car’s engine on Friday afternoon, couldn’t get it to turn over.
“A lot of water,” is how he described the flooding that had inundated his car. Worse still, he said, as continued to try to get his car to start, was his home, around the corner.
“The basement is like water, too, in my house,” he said.
Like a variety of people in his neighborhood, Ojeda is looking forward to near-perfect weather conditions over the weekend, but will end up spending much of the weekend cleaning up and drying out from the terrible weather that preceded it.
