This time, the sound of hammering rain told her that trouble was coming. “The kids were doing our afternoon activities,” she said, “and they were, like, ‘Oh, the water’s coming up the door!’ ” A co-worker called down: water was rising into Goodwin’s car out front. When she opened the door of the day care, she recalled, “the water just rushed in. The kids were screaming and hollering.”
She and a colleague lifted the children onto tables. Stormwater, Goodwin pointed out, picks up “everything off the street”—gasoline, heavy metals, raw sewage, rodents. As the foul mix reached knee level, she called 911. Firefighters arrived, and they helped the day-care staff carry the children over a fence and up to a higher floor. Everyone made it out safely.
A few blocks away, at Kingston Avenue and Rutland Road, Aaron Akaberi, thirty-nine, was in a basement apartment with his two dogs when water began surging in. He carried one dog to higher ground and went back for the other. But the flood must have moved faster, and more forcefully, than he expected. Within seconds, Akaberi and his pet were fighting for air. Both drowned. Their bodies were recovered only after the Fire Department’s rescue dive team brought in a pump.
A flood sensor at the intersection recorded 22.4 inches of water at street level between 3:01 and 3:26 P.M.; underground spaces took on several additional feet. The downpour surprised almost everyone, yet the day’s total rainfall matched the forecast—about two inches. Flooding is less a matter of how much rain falls than of how fast it falls. Two inches over a day is one thing. Two inches in thirty minutes can overwhelm drainage systems and leave deep ponds in lower areas as water races downhill.
“This was, by our computation, about a five-to-ten-year event,” Radell told me, using a metric that, because it’s built on past patterns, grows less useful as climate change defies those patterns. Events like this have begun to feel ordinary—recurring evidence of the mismatch between aging infrastructure and an emerging ecological reality. That’s why a new generation of designers are reimagining flood control, starting with a counterintuitive premise: the safest city is one that can take water in.
There’s a formula behind the flooding. The Clausius-Clapeyron equation, which was introduced almost two centuries ago, describes the relationship between air temperature and atmospheric pressure. Warmer air holds more water, and the relationship is exponential, so small increases in temperature can yield huge jumps in rainfall intensity. For years, climate scientists have said that warming would bring heavier downpours. Now, it seems, that future has arrived.
In recent years, cities have been living through short storms that turn subway stations into lakes, streets into rivers, cars into boats. Zhengzhou, China, got nearly eight inches of rain in an hour on July 20, 2021. In the Libyan cities of Derna and Bayda, there were no monitors measuring hourly rates on September 10 and 11, 2023, but the totals suggest a storm of terrifying force: more than sixteen inches in twenty-four hours, followed by two dam collapses and more than eleven thousand deaths. The Valencia region of Spain drew global attention on October 29, 2024, when almost seven inches fell in an hour. Elsewhere, record-setting twenty-four-hour totals, including in São Paulo, Dubai, and Milwaukee, have underlined the new reality.
No city was designed for this kind of weather. Modern sewers took shape in the nineteenth century, typically after disasters pushed cities to upgrade their civil infrastructure. Hamburg rebuilt after the fire of 1842, London after summers like the so-called Great Stink of 1858. Engineers replaced streams and marshes with gravity-fed pipes that carried sewage and stormwater toward rivers and seas. These “combined systems” depended on rain to flush the network, and they were built for ordinary storms. When the skies really opened, they backed up.
