Photo: Courtesy of Patricia Ceballos In the days after Tropical Storm Ida hit New York City, the sidewalks along 89th Street in East Elmhurst were crowded with mud-soiled belongings: couches, mattresses, wooden desks, toys. This block of one-story, redbrick houses — home to working-class residents and immigrant families from countries like the Dominican Republic, Chile, Ecuador, and Colombia — suffered some of the worst flooding in the city.
Photo: Courtesy of Yurly Olivares I’ve been in East Elmhurst since 2001. Our house had already flooded back in 2005, and even with a light rain we sometimes get water coming into the garage because the sewer system in the area is horrible. So we’ve grown used to setting up sandbags for our house. We had a storm three weeks ago and were expecting something big, but nothing happened — so with this storm, nobody was really expecting it to be as bad as it was.
Photo: Courtesy of Rob Meija Downstairs is where we keep everything: The kids have all their beds, their school supplies, their uniforms and computers, their game systems, their toys, their bicycles. My mother has a sewing machine down there. The boiler got ruined. The hot-water heater got ruined. We lost everything: the kids’ pictures, our wedding pictures, all our clothes. The only thing I was able to save was my father’s ashes. That’s what meant the most to me.
Photo: Courtesy of Marcelo Perez In just 30 minutes, around five-to-six feet of water got inside the house. I have a metal door in the basement, and the water bent it — it was coming in like it was the Titanic! At around 9:30 p.m., the basement door got stuck with the water, and I couldn’t even open it so I called one of my neighbors for help. I had legalized my basement, so I had another exit but at the moment, I was panicking, I didn’t know what to do. Thank God, I’m tall.
We practically lost everything. The couch, the fridge, the washing machine, the clothes, the linens — everything was floating in water. I have three closets in the basement where I put the sheets, the towels, shoes that were in their boxes. Everything was floating. We lost all of that. I had recently bought groceries for the month and lost all of that, too. You should have seen the rolls of toilet paper and paper towels floating! A huge bag of rice, superheavy, was also floating.
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