NYC to hire forecaster, beef up warnings after Ida flooding

NEW YORK (AP) — New York City is planning to hire a private weather forecaster, install more drainage features and issue earlier and more aggressive warnings to residents under a new plan to respond to heavy rainfall like the deadly deluge Hurricane Ida dropped on the city earlier this month.

At least 50 people from Virginia to Connecticut , including 13 in New York City, die d this month when the remnants of Hurricane Ida inundated the Northeast. Rainwater trapped hundreds of cars on submerged waterways, deluged subway stations, and stalled trains and flooded basement apartments, turning them into deadly traps.

At its most intense, the storm dropped 3.15 inches (8 centimeters) of rain within an hour over New York City, overwhelming an aging sewer system designed to handle roughly half that.

“We learned from Ida that we have to do some very very different things," Mayor Bill de Blasio said Monday at a virtual news conference. “This is a brand new world.”

The city will hire a private weather forecasting service to provide a “second opinion” to the city that supplements National Weather Service predictions and creates neighborhood-specific forecasts for storms, according to the Democratic mayor's plan.

De Blasio said the National Weather Service does “good and important work," but often its reports "were too vague or too late and we need something more urgent.”

He likened it to the city creating its own counterterrorism and intelligence division in the New York City Police Department after 9/11 terrorist attacks. After the storm hit, de Blasio said he’d been given a forecast that the city would see somewhere between 3 to 6 inches (7.5 to 15 cm) of rain for the day — not 3 inches within one hour.

The National Weather Service said in a statement that it welcomed New York...