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| A drone (if you look carefully at middle of photo) delivers a flash flood warning to a New York City neighborhood on August 6. |
On your smart phone, you get an obnoxious, but potentially life saving loud noise when a warning for dangerous weather pops up. The National Weather Service and your friendly local meteorologists post similar warnings online and on TV when the weather gets too risky.
But drones?
When flash flooding threatened New York City on August 6, the city deployed high tech drones to fly over vulnerable neighborhoods warning of the impending danger.
For good reason. New York has tons of flood-prone basement apartments, some legal, many others not so much.
In 2021, the remnants of Hurricane Ida swept into the New York City metro area, unleashing record amounts of rain and creating intense flash floods.
Eleven people died when they became trapped in New York City basement apartments as they filled with water from Ida's torrents. Many others barely escaped with their lives, but lost all their possessions.
The Big Apple probably has something like 100,000 people living in illegal basement apartments, according to estimates.
Many of the people living in these apartments might not have easy access to flood warnings. Hence the drones.
The drones flew over vulnerable neighborhoods, broadcasting flash flood warnings in English and Spanish.
Or sort of Spanish.
The drones' voice translation of Spanish from English left a lot to be desired. Apparently, the Spanish coming from the drones was awful, so bad hardly anyone could understand it.
Roughly a quarter of NYC residents speak Spanish at home, so it's important to communicate warnings in that language.
The Spanish warning sounded like a robot trying to say the words phonetically, but pronouncing them like a rube who has never in his life heard a Spanish word before. It sounded bad to me, and I have next to no ability to say anything in Spanish.
As it turned out, the text of the message as written in Spanish was correct. The recording was muddled, though, city emergency officials said.
The English language versions were pretty straightforward, anyway. The drones, buzzing over neighborhoods, said, "If you live in a basement or a ground floor apartment, leave your location if flooding occurs."
The intentions of this drone were good, but reaction on social media was not great. "Creepy," "Scary," "Very Orwellian," "Cringe" "Yikes" and "Shoot it" were some of the responses.
To me, yeah, the drones seemed a little weird. But I can support any method available to warm people of life-threatening danger.
In the end, there was some flash flooding in New York that day. Central Park was deluged with two inches of rain in just a few hours on August 6. Thankfully, the downpours were not nearly on the scale of what happened during ex-hurricane Ida.
During Ida, Central Park received 8.2 inches of rain, including 3.15 inches in a single hour. As you can imagine, the flooding then was extreme.
But this kind of thing happened again. The catastrophic flooding Sunday in Connecticut caused by six to 12 inches of rain was painfully close to New York City. So these drones might not be the worst idea after all.
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