A Queens elected official is demanding that New York's City Hall change the way it spends its money after another round of severe flooding hit the borough and neighboring Brooklyn. Queens City Council member Phil Wong sent a pointed message to Mayor Zohran Mamdani, calling on the administration to shift its spending priorities toward flood prevention. His demand landed as residents across parts of Queens and Brooklyn once again found their streets and homes underwater.
Wong's criticism stems from a string of severe storms over the past month that repeatedly left low lying neighborhoods submerged. The council member argued that residents should not have to keep bracing for the same outcome every time heavy rain sweeps through the city. For many families in his district, the flooding has become a recurring ordeal rather than a rare emergency.
The latest deluge arrived early Sunday morning, when a fast and furious storm turned streets into channels of water. Outside King Central Deli, at the corner of Putnam and Central Avenues in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn, the water rose so high that the owner, Malik, could barely open his business. He said he lost a great deal of merchandise, that his older car was ruined, and that his computer was no longer working after the water poured in.
The downpour was not limited to Brooklyn. In Newark, the sky opened up around 6:45 a.m., dumping rain across the region in a short span of time. The speed of the flooding caught drivers off guard as familiar roads disappeared beneath the water, leaving motorists unsure of which routes were still safe to travel.
One of those drivers, Dania, was riding in a car that came upon a flooded street the occupants believed they could pass through. Instead, the water surged up around the vehicle without warning and the car came to a stop in the middle of it. First responders had to step in to help her and the people trapped in several other cars that had become stranded in the rising water.
Against that backdrop, Wong pressed the city to take concrete steps rather than temporary ones. He said communities like his need cleaner sewers and catch basins, along with more drainage and greater retention capacity to hold back the water during intense storms. In his view, the infrastructure has not kept pace with the frequency and force of the flooding.
In his letter to Mayor Mamdani, Wong did not soften his language. He wrote that the flooding is not something happening once every decade anymore, but multiple times a month, and that the administration's response continues to be press releases, sandbags and photo opportunities after the water has already entered someone's home. That, he said, is not a plan but damage control, adding that his constituents deserve better. Back at the Bushwick deli, workers voiced little confidence that things would change soon, noting that the block had flooded only two days earlier, and even worse than this time.