NEW YORK CITY — A band of heavy rain moved over Brooklyn after 3 p.m. on Oct. 29, 2025, dropping more than an inch of rain in less than fifteen minutes, flooding subway stations, a daycare center and a basement apartment where one man drowned. The same day, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority released an update to its Climate Resilience Roadmap, proposing $1.5 billion for upgraded flood controls including high-capacity pumps and elevated station entrances.

The day's total rainfall was about two inches, matching a forecast from the National Weather Service, which had warned that New York City would experience gusty winds and one to two inches of rain from an incoming low-pressure system. A flood sensor at Kingston Avenue and Rutland Road in Brooklyn recorded 22.4 inches of water at street level between 3:01 and 3:26 p.m., and underground spaces at that intersection were inundated with several additional feet of water above street level.

Meteorologist David Radell described the storm's rainfall. "Big, round drops, just a bit smaller than a dime. Potentially something folks haven't experienced before." Radell added: "This was, by our computation, about a five-to-ten-year event." "Hurricane Ida was the real turning point for the National Weather Service in New York," he said.

At Kingston Avenue and Rutland Road, Aaron Akaberi, 39, was in a basement apartment with his two dogs when floodwater began surging in. Akaberi carried one dog to higher ground and returned to rescue the other. He and the second dog drowned. Their bodies were recovered by the Fire Department's rescue dive team after it deployed a pump.

In East Flatbush, a neighborhood at the bottom of a hill where rainwater can rush in fast enough to breach basements and ground floors, day-care operator Sheila Goodwin was supervising a room of young children when the storm struck. "The kids were doing our afternoon activities and they were, like, 'Oh, the water's coming up the door!'" Goodwin said. "The water just rushed in. The kids were screaming and hollering." She and a colleague lifted the children onto tables, and when stormwater reached knee level inside the facility, Goodwin called 911. Firefighters arrived and helped staff carry the children over a fence to a higher floor. All children and staff were evacuated safely.

The MTA also urged New York City to modernize its combined sewage and stormwater system. The city's combined systems were built for ordinary storms and back up during heavy rainfall. In the 1970s, the city standardized flood-control infrastructure to handle 1.75 inches of rain per hour; no recorded storm reached that hourly rate before 1991. Since the 1990s, eight storms have exceeded that threshold.

In the eighteen months before the roadmap update, the transit network experienced six floods, six heat waves and its driest month on record. Hurricane Ida in 2021 delivered 3.15 inches of rain in one hour in Manhattan, prompted the city's first flash-flood emergency and killed thirteen people. Climate scientists have predicted that warming would bring heavier downpours, as warmer air holds more water and small increases in temperature can correspond to large increases in rainfall intensity.