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It was 10 years ago Tuesday when flash flooding put the South Shore underwater, from Babylon to East Islip.
Locals remember it like it was yesterday.
One Greater Long Island reader, Nicole Stephanie, has a constant reminder
“I went into labor that morning,” she wrote on our GreaterBayShore Facebook feed. “That was a fun ride to the hospital!”
This Tuesday, Aug. 13, her little Lily Rayne turned 10 years old.
And Jean Gabrini was teaching at Stony Brook but had to stay home that day with her infant son. That’s because her mom, who was heading over to sit, got stranded with hundreds of other cars on the Southern State.
This all happened less than two years after Hurricane Sandy swamped Long Island in October 2012.
The historic flash flooding of 2014, as seen in photos. Source: National Weather Service
According to the National Weather Service, the historic flash flooding of Aug. 13, 2014, was caused by what NWS meteorologists described as an “anomalously deep upper level trough” — in layman’s terms, a sort of bizarre variation of a low-pressure weather system that causes wind and rain— that was moving into the Northeast the morning of Aug. 12.
The storm was also moving deep moisture over Long Island.
At the surface, another wicked system called a low parent pressure system was moving across southeast Canada, “with secondary low development just south of New York City. Then the two clashed, and fought, right over Islip.
“Heavy precipitation focused along and just north of the warm front associated with the secondary low pressure system,” NWS meteorologists explained in a special anniversary message about the event. “The mean storm motion was parallel to the orientation of the warm front and was significant in helping maintain heavy rain over Islip for several hours.”
Much too much rain for our infrastructure to handle, consider storm trains could typically capture 1 inch per hour.
Images of cars submerged on the Southern State parkway flooded the news and social media.
“It was truly a nightmare,” wrote reader Lynn Stavdal. “I struggled my way into the high school [where] I worked to help administer Regents exams for summer school students. My usual 10 min drive took over two hours.”
Some in the area are still struggling to recover a decade later.
“Lost my finished basement and first floor, two cars in the driveway!” wrote Dawn Isaac Edwards. “Hundreds of thousands of dollars spent and still not fully recovered from this disaster!”
Below are more photos shared from readers from this Facebook post, including a massive sinkhole at the Stop & Shop shopping center at Montauk Highway and Saxon Avenue in Bay Shore submitted by reader Mary Collins.
Click here for several satellite images from that day.
Top: Photo submitted to GreaterBayShore on Facebook by Michele Jackowski.
