Long Island storm prep increasingly means expect the unexpected

The phone call in the dead of night that woke Town of Brookhaven Supervisor Dan Panico one year ago Tuesday brought news of a power-packed thunderstorm that buffeted Suffolk's North Shore, worst of all in Stony Brook, where the dam supporting Harbor Road at centuries-old Mill Pond collapsed.

His Yankees cap fixed atop his uncombed hair, Panico watched the water rush out of the pond, leaving a trail of dead fish and damaged homes.

"It’s a blur; I just remember vividly all of the lights — emergency management personnel, fire departments that were out there," Panico recalled of the moment he pulled up to Harbor Road in Stony Brook, which remains barricaded a year later, to prevent cars from driving into the pit where the dam stood.

"As the sun came up," he added, "you saw the extent of the devastation that was caused by Mother Nature."

In a matter of hours, the overnight storm on Aug. 18 and 19 had caught sleeping Long Islanders by surprise and dumped up to 10 inches of rain in Stony Brook, as well as Port Jefferson Station, Smithtown, Sound Beach and other nearby communities, according to a map Newsday published last August.

Experts warn that as the climate continues to warm, extreme rains and destructive flash floods like the ones that left an estimated $41 million in damage behind in Suffolk last summer are destined to douse Long Island. Precisely where, according to Long Island weather experts, will likely remain a mystery until the skies open.

That means public officials are scrambling to adjust to new weather extremes that local infrastructure may not be designed to handle.

"That’s the overarching story that you’re seeing now, not only on Long Island but in various parts of the Eastern Seaboard," Panico said, "that the rain events are just so fast and so heavy that they are truly inundating any type of municipal collection system that is in place."

Meteorologists have the ability to issue a flood watch alert  for the Long Island and New York City region between 12 and even 24 hours in advance of an approaching storm, said Jase Bernhardt, an associate professor of geology, environment and sustainability at Hofstra University. 

But the more actionable and localized alerts people want arrive much later.

"It’s great to have that notice ... but you still can’t always pinpoint that exact locality, which is always frustrating to people," Bernhardt said. "To pinpoint at that level, like what county or what town, unfortunately might only come very close to when the flooding actually happens."

Case in point, late  Aug. 18, 2024, into the early the next morning.

Within a matter of hours, Stony Brook, including parts of the university, as well as Rocky Point and Sound Beach were under a deluge. Homeowners, college students and other community members flooded out of bed and into the street. At the same time, according to Newsday's map, Kings Park, just to the west, recorded 5.07 inches of rain. Just to the east, Riverhead notched 4.53.

"It literally looked like Lake Michigan in front of my house," said Madison Carbone, 23, of Rocky Point. Like Panico, she awoke on Aug. 19 to a phone call. Her mother, who was out of town, asked her for an eyewitness account of the heavy rain she heard hit their neighborhood.

"I didn’t know what to do," Carbone said upon finding her basement and garage in ruins. "I was super scared."

The forecast for Aug. 18, a Sunday, had given few hints of what was to come. Newsday's weather page, provided by Access Weather Inc., a forecast provider based in Kissimmee, Florida, put the chance of thunderstorms on Long Island during the day at 50%, diminishing to showers in the evening. 

And the warming planet is contributing to even more frequent, powerful and unpredictable storm bursts such as these.

"With climate change ... we’re seeing more extremes," Bernhardt said. "In a changing climate, the basic idea is the warmer atmosphere can hold more moisture or more water vapor, that can potentially facilitate ... heavier hourly rainfall amounts."

Expecting the unexpected

That sort of unpredictability and weather instability has led leaders in Suffolk and Nassau to try their best to prepare for the unexpected. Their highway department crews clear storm drains connected to local waterways, and recharge basins that send rainfall into the water table year-round. But regardless of whether they are clear and ready for use, these drainage systems are ill-equipped for excessive rain in short bursts.

Carbone's neighbors in Rocky Point witnessed this firsthand last summer.

"It’s a river down our street every time" it rains too heavily, Carbone's neighbor Kristi Parrella said, but the August 2024 storm was an outlier.

"We were surprised that it flooded that bad," said Parrella, 39, of the street where she lives, Second Avenue.

"The sump has never filled like that, and then it just dumped right over into the street."

The Brookhaven Town Board has approved spending $12.5 million on various flood-control projects so far in 2025, including installing new recharge basins, comm only referred to as sumps, which collect storm runoff for eventual seepage into the groundwater supply, said Highway Superintendent Dan Losquadro.

Brookhaven routinely acquires land to install new recharge basins. In densely developed problem spots like Rocky Point, where "you have very steep terrain" and little land available, it can pose a challenge, Losquadro said.

Fewer land options

His crews had to "completely reconstruct" the Rocky Point sump overwhelmed by the storm. It was designed to handle an 8-inch rainstorm and sustained "significant damage."

"We are endeavoring to add as much capacity and infrastructure as we can into these areas," Losquadro said. "But we are limited by the amount of land available. ... There's just no excess land in those areas to build new recharge basins."

Panico said the number of properties purchased by the town to construct sumps or other drainage structures "has increased mightily in the last five, six years."

"We have issues on the North Shore, we have issues on the South Shore. ... And then in the center of the Island, 10 years ago, you would never even think about carrying a flood insurance policy in Selden or Centereach. You’re seeing these tremendous rain events that are wreaking havoc in neighborhoods."

In the wooded, hilly neighborhoods and university facilities hit hardest last August, the damage extended far beyond sumps overrun by floodwaters.

Flooding on the Stony Brook University campus damaged multiple buildings, school officials told Newsday in an email through a spokesperson. The Gray and Ammann residence halls sustained the worst damage, according to the university. A Newsday story put the cost of campus damage from the storm at an estimated $22 million but university officials recently told Newsday that final costs have yet to be determined.

"Water levels reached a peak of approximately nine feet inside the buildings," school officials said in the email. 

Meanwhile, some residents in heavily damaged Rocky Point said they are either rebuilding or replacing what they lost — including in at least one case, two vehicles — and hope they never again wake up to what many at the time referred to as a once-in-a-generation storm.

All of Carbone's belongings stored in her basement — her MacBook, her college textbooks and all the mementos she received from children as a student teacher — were destroyed, as was exercise equipment in her garage, which she said was "underwater."

Her car, which she had paid off two months earlier, and her father's work van, both parked in the driveway, were destroyed. Carbone has "nightmares" she will find herself once again facing a life-threatening storm, alone.

"It definitely was heartbreaking to see, but I’m very grateful because all of my neighbors helped me so much," she said. "We don’t keep important stuff anywhere that can be flooded now."