Our GIS chops are what they’re going to be – so with a tip of the hat to the historian Daniel Soyer, here’s what we believe to be the relevant data about the behavior of storm drains local to ZIP 11218 during last weekend’s storm:

1. water was on the sidewalks – overflowing from the curb – at the Caton School, the public school which is the nearby reception center in OEM’s flood planning. We’re not sure if there is a storm drain at that intersection; if there was, it wasn’t working very well.
2. At the traffic circle at Coney Island Avenue and Parkside (the beginning/end of Coney Island Avenue – water was surging out of the storm drains a full 24 hours after the rain had stopped. This is a location which is diagonally across the Parade Ground from the Caton School – and even closer to the buillding which houses both Parks Department personnel and the NYPD’s Brooklyn South Task Force.
3. During the storm, the drains on the other side of the Parade Ground – at the intersection of Caton and Stratford, the drains were clearly not functioning.

It certainly seemed as though a major flood-evacuation reception center might, given heavier rains, have been renderes less useful. According to the National Weather Service records, most of our area has gotten about ten inches of rain for the entire month – including last weekend’s storm.

By appearances – and to untrained eyes, to be sure – it seemed as though a larger amount of rain – say 24 inches – would have interfered with the operation of the reception center planned for the Caton School building – not least because of the difficulties of using motor vehicles in water.

There may be some other planning or mechanisms of which we’re not aware. We’re still on this.

For all of you who submitted data, and helped us test the form, we thank you. We hope in the near future to have a more sophisticated, easier to use interface – which might allow both long-term, planning-related and fast-and-dirty real-time data collection. We’re working on it.

JS