Parts of New York City were left underwater on Saturday as heavy thunderstorms triggered flash flooding across the metropolitan area, disrupting subway lines and grounding hundreds of flights ahead of the World Cup final.
Social media footage quickly captured the scale of the disruption, with commuters and drivers documenting severe conditions across the boroughs.
“People are literally swimming,” one woman can be heard saying in a video posted by Instagram account @subwaycreatures. In another video, posted by creator Taylor Prokes, people can be seen treading through New York City’s SoHo neighborhood with trash bags over their legs and water reaching their knees.
Videos showed trash cans and outdoor restaurant umbrellas floating down flooded avenues, with water rising past car tires and turning neighborhood streets into makeshift streams. Commuters navigating the subway system filmed water cascading down entrance staircases, including at the Canal Street station, where water also broke through the ceilings to create waterfalls pouring directly onto platforms.
On the streets, residents were seen using brooms to sweep rising water away from their vehicles, while pedestrians used shopping bags over their heads to shield themselves from the rain.
By Saturday afternoon, the National Weather Service reported between 2 and 4 inches of rain had fallen, with downpours reaching rates of up to an inch per hour. The heaviest rainfall concentrated over lower Manhattan, western Brooklyn and parts of Queens, prompting emergency officials to urge residents in basement apartments to seek higher ground.
On the city’s roads, rising waters quickly trapped drivers and gridlocked traffic.
All lanes of the Long Island Expressway at 188th Street were temporarily blocked in both directions, while flooding also forced closures on the Clearview Expressway at Northern Boulevard, CNN reported. On a roadway above the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, multiple vehicles were left entirely submerged, forcing some people to wade through waist-high water.
The Metropolitan Transportation Authority reported major service disruptions across the transit network as a result of the runoff pouring onto the tracks.
The flash floods also caused severe delays at the region’s airports. Major flight cancellations and delays affected LaGuardia, John F. Kennedy International and Newark Liberty International airports.
According to the Federal Aviation Administration, some arriving flights at JFK faced average delays of more than an hour and a half. The travel disruptions occurred on the eve of the World Cup final match, scheduled to take place in nearby New Jersey on Sunday.
The storm follows days of hazardous air quality conditions in the Northeast, driven by smoke from nearly 1,000 active wildfires in Canada. Meteorologists expect the rain and an approaching cold front to help dissipate the smoke, though officials warned that improvements to air quality may not be immediate.
New York Governor Kathy Hochul urged residents to remain cautious, warning that the severe weather could still cause power outages, downed trees and further road closures through the weekend.
