New Yorkers woke Sunday morning to a sound that has become disturbingly familiar this August.
Heavy rain.
At first, it was just another summer storm.
Then the water started rising.
In Brooklyn, streets began disappearing beneath brown floodwater. Parked cars were surrounded. One vehicle in Park Slope became so deeply submerged that video from the scene showed water climbing above its tires.
Across Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens and the Bronx, phones began buzzing with flash-flood warnings.
The National Weather Service had a simple message:
Move to higher ground.
Don’t drive into flooded roads.
And don’t assume the water is as shallow as it looks.
Because underneath that water could be almost anything.
But there’s an important detail about the dramatic image circulating with this story:
The image showing a car being swallowed by a giant sinkhole is an illustration, not a verified photograph from Sunday’s New York flooding.
The real event didn’t need embellishment.
What actually happened across New York was dramatic enough.
The warning came just after 7 a.m.
At 7:21 Sunday morning, August 23, the National Weather Service issued a Flash Flood Warning covering a huge portion of the New York metropolitan area.
Brooklyn.
Manhattan.
Queens.
The Bronx.
Nassau County.
And part of Westchester County.
Radar indicated thunderstorms were dumping heavy rain across the area, with approximately 1 to 1.5 inches already fallen in some locations.
And more was coming.
That’s when ordinary Sunday-morning travel began turning into something very different.
In Park Slope, a car was disappearing into the water
Citizen footage from Denton Place in Brooklyn captured one of the most striking scenes.
A vehicle sat submerged in floodwater.
Nearby parked cars had water creeping higher around their tires.
The road itself barely looked like a road anymore.
News 12 described conditions as hazardous for both drivers and pedestrians as flooding spread through Park Slope.
For anyone standing at the edge of that water, there was an obvious temptation:
Maybe I can still make it through.
That’s exactly the decision emergency officials desperately want people to avoid.
New York had already been soaked days earlier
Sunday’s flooding wasn’t happening after weeks of dry weather.
New York had already been hammered by storms.
On Thursday, August 20, severe thunderstorms dumped more than two inches of rain across several parts of the city.
Central Park recorded 2.31 inches.
LaGuardia recorded 2.25 inches.
Parts of the Bronx exceeded two inches.
Brooklyn and Staten Island approached similar totals.
Then came Sunday.
More water.
More warnings.
More flooded streets.
By August 23, New York City had already received more than eight inches of rain during the month, making it the city’s wettest August in at least five years.
And residents were feeling it.
Just days earlier, drivers had been trapped
Thursday’s storm provided a preview of how dangerous urban flooding can become.
In Queens, water accumulated so quickly that the Long Island Expressway had to be shut down in both directions at Francis Lewis Boulevard.
Drivers were stranded.
FDNY personnel searched beneath an overpass to make sure nobody was trapped.
On 188th Street, CBS New York reported that the rainwater looked almost like ocean waves moving through the roadway as people attempted to push a flooded vehicle.
Businesses weren’t spared either.
Water pushed toward storefronts.
Sandbags couldn’t stop it.
And passing buses created waves that sent still more water toward buildings.
Then transportation started collapsing
Heavy rain doesn’t need to destroy a bridge to bring a city to a halt.
Sometimes it simply needs to fall faster than drainage systems can remove it.
Thursday’s storms disrupted subway service and flooded major roads.
LaGuardia Airport temporarily shut down and recorded more than 210 cancellations, while JFK recorded another 167 cancellations.
People trying to drive encountered flooded streets.
People taking public transportation encountered delays.
People trying to fly encountered cancellations.
Suddenly, millions of normal routines were being dictated by water.
And across the Hudson, rescuers needed boats
Perhaps the most extraordinary scenes came from Jersey City.
There, 69 people were rescued from vehicles after flash flooding trapped drivers.
Emergency responders used inflatable boats to move through streets that had effectively become waterways.
Think about that image.
Traffic lights above.
Buildings on both sides.
Cars where they normally are.
Except rescuers are traveling down the street in a boat.
That’s how quickly an urban environment can become unrecognizable.
Why city flooding becomes dangerous so quickly
In rural areas, some rainfall can soak into open ground.
Cities are different.
Roofs don’t absorb rain.
Concrete doesn’t absorb it.
Asphalt doesn’t absorb it.
Parking lots don’t absorb it.
Water runs toward drains.
When rainfall becomes too intense, those systems can be overwhelmed.
NYC Emergency Management warned ahead of Thursday’s storms that stronger thunderstorms could produce rainfall rates of one to two inches per hour.
That’s an enormous amount of water arriving in a short period.
And because rainfall can be highly localized, one neighborhood may look relatively normal while another nearby is flooding.
The road underneath may no longer be the road you remember
This is one reason authorities tell people never to drive through floodwater.
You know the street.
You drive it every day.
You know where the curb is.
You know where the potholes are.
But once water covers everything, you don’t actually know what you’re driving onto.
NYC Emergency Management specifically warned that floodwater can conceal openings, debris, submerged hazards and electrical dangers.
The pavement itself can also be compromised.
And yes, roads really can collapse.
A real New York car WAS recently swallowed by a sinkhole — but it was a different event
This is where the viral-looking image accompanying this story becomes particularly interesting.
A car really was swallowed by a sinkhole in New York recently.
But it happened in Syracuse, not during Sunday’s New York City flash flooding.
In July, a water-main break on Geddes Street caused the roadway to collapse.
A vehicle fell into the resulting sinkhole and became partially submerged.
The driver escaped safely without injuries.
That’s a real event.
But combining that incident with this weekend’s NYC flooding would create a story that never actually happened.
And when real weather is already this dramatic, there’s no reason to do that.
Sunday brought another round
By early Sunday morning, thunderstorms were again producing heavy rainfall over New York.
The National Weather Service warned that flooding was occurring or expected across streets and highways.
Park Slope became one of the places where the consequences were visible.
Footage showed vehicles sitting in deep water.
Drivers and pedestrians faced hazardous conditions.
And once again authorities urged people to avoid flooded roads entirely.
For residents who had just watched Thursday’s chaos, it probably felt like the city had barely dried out before the next round arrived.
This August has been unusually wet
More than eight inches of rain had fallen in New York City by August 23.
For comparison, August 2025 brought only around 2.21 inches, according to recent reporting.
That doesn’t mean every neighborhood received the same amount.
Summer thunderstorms can be incredibly uneven.
One area gets drenched.
Another gets comparatively little.
But repeated storms matter.
Soil becomes saturated.
Drainage systems repeatedly face heavy loads.
Streams and waterways respond faster.
And people become exhausted by constant disruptions.
Basement residents face a particularly frightening risk
Flooding doesn’t only threaten drivers.
In New York City, thousands of people live in basement and below-grade apartments.
When water begins rushing downward, those spaces can become dangerous quickly.
That’s why NYC Emergency Management specifically advised people living below grade to monitor conditions and move to a safer location before water begins entering their home if flooding appears likely.
Waiting until water is already coming through the door can leave very little time.
It’s the same principle authorities emphasize with vehicles:
Act before the situation looks desperate.
The city had activated its Flash Flood Emergency Plan
Officials weren’t caught completely unaware.
Ahead of Thursday’s severe weather, NYC Emergency Management activated the city’s Flash Flood Emergency Plan and coordinated with the National Weather Service and other agencies.
Forecasts had warned that rainfall could become intense enough to create dangerous travel conditions.
But knowing flooding is possible and knowing exactly which street will flood are two different things.
Urban thunderstorms can dump extraordinary amounts of rain over very small areas.
That’s why the warning can apply broadly while the worst damage appears block by block.
Then there was another threat entirely
The same weather pattern that brought flooding also produced tornadoes elsewhere in the Northeast.
At Atlantic Beach on Long Island, a waterspout formed over the Atlantic and moved ashore as a tornado, damaging a beach club.
In Dover, Delaware, another tornado damaged buildings.
Meanwhile, Jersey City crews were rescuing people from cars and New York drivers were encountering flooded highways.
Water below.
Dangerous winds above.
For emergency crews, it became a remarkably complicated weather event.
The strangest thing about flash flooding is how ordinary it looks beforehand
There isn’t always a dramatic wall of water approaching.
Sometimes it’s simply raining hard.
You leave the grocery store.
You get into the car.
You take the same route home you’ve driven hundreds of times.
There’s water across the road.
The car ahead goes through.
So you follow.
Then the water gets deeper.
The engine stalls.
And suddenly you’re one of the people everyone else is watching on the evening news.
That’s why meteorologists repeat the same warning until people are tired of hearing it:
Never drive into floodwater.
Six inches can matter
People tend to judge water by whether it looks deep enough to cover a vehicle.
That’s the wrong threshold.
According to long-standing National Weather Service safety guidance, relatively shallow moving water can knock a person down, while deeper fast-moving water can begin moving vehicles.
You don’t need an SUV to disappear completely before the situation becomes dangerous.
And once a vehicle begins floating, steering and braking become essentially irrelevant.
The water decides where the car goes.
The viral image gets one thing right
The specific dramatic image of a car dropping into a giant sinkhole isn’t a photograph of Sunday’s NYC flood.
But the emotion behind it is real.
Floodwater can hide what is beneath it.
Roads can fail.
Cars can become trapped.
Drivers can suddenly discover that the surface they thought was safe isn’t.
That is precisely why New York officials warned people not to walk, bike or drive into flooded areas.
You aren’t simply judging the water.
You’re judging everything you can’t see underneath it.
By Sunday afternoon, the city was again cleaning up
That’s the rhythm of severe summer weather.
Warning.
Rain.
Flooding.
Emergency response.
Cleanup.
Then another forecast.
For most New Yorkers, streets eventually reopen and life returns to normal.
But for the owner of a flooded vehicle, the business cleaning water from its floor or the family living below street level, the storm doesn’t end when the clouds disappear.
Water damage lingers.
Cars may be ruined.
Furniture needs replacing.
Insurance claims begin.
Mold becomes a concern.
And the next thunderstorm suddenly feels different.
New York may finally get a break
Forecasts indicated that another system could arrive later in the week before a potentially drier stretch.
After such a wet August, that would be welcome news.
But this month’s storms have already left behind a useful reminder.
Cities can look permanent.
Roads feel solid.
Subways feel immovable.
Highways seem capable of handling almost anything.
Then several inches of rain fall quickly enough.
And suddenly highways close.
Cars stall.
Subways slow.
Airports cancel flights.
Rescuers launch inflatable boats onto city streets.
The real photographs are dramatic enough
A vehicle submerged in Park Slope.
Drivers stranded in Queens.
Floodwater rolling through streets like waves.
Firefighters searching flooded underpasses.
Sixty-nine people rescued from vehicles across the Hudson.
Those scenes actually happened.
And perhaps the most important image isn’t the spectacular one.
It’s the ordinary driver approaching water across a familiar road and deciding whether to continue.
Because that’s the moment when a weather story can become a rescue story.
New York has spent much of August learning that lesson repeatedly.
When a city street turns into a river, the most dangerous thing may be what the water isn’t letting you see.
For more dramatic weather events, see what happened when 69 People Were Trapped Inside Their Cars – Then Rescuers Brought Out Boats in the Middle of the Street or when Beachgoers Saw It Form Over the Ocean – Minutes Later, It Crossed Onto Long Island With More Than 100 People in Its Path.
