NEW YORK — New Yorkers stand on ground that is crumbling beneath their feet — and Angelo Bastone has seen it for himself.
Bastone was cleaning the drain on the side of his house in the Bronx’s Morris Park neighborhood in July when he heard a “thump.” He rushed to his window and looked over to nearby Radcliff Avenue, where he saw a sinkhole had opened up so big that it swallowed a van.
“A lot of places in this area have a lot of big potholes, and they’re going to sink,” said Bastone, 56, who’s lived in the area his entire life.
The July 19 cave-in — which grew to 15 feet wide, 58 feet long and 20 feet deep — was one of thousands of sinkholes identified throughout the city this year, a growing problem city officials blame on aging sewer systems that crumble under increasingly heavy rainfall sparked by climate change.
The city’s Department of Environmental protection identified 3,921 sinkholes during the fiscal year that ended in June. That’s up from 2,839 in the year before, a 38% increase.
Sinkholes like the one near Bastone’s Bronx home are largely caused by cracks in century-old sewer systems, DEP Commissioner Rohit Aggarwala explained during a City Council hearing last Tuesday.
The sewers in Morris Park were built in 1916 of interlocking vitrified block, which is designed to be leakproof and was deemed highly modern when the Bronx borough president ordered them installed, Aggarwala said.
But the lines were built to handle about 1.5 inches of rainfall per hour. That’s below the city’s current typical standard for sewers to handle 1.75 inches of rain per hour, Aggarwala said. He added that the 1.75-inch-per-hour standard is proving inadequate in powerful storms that hit the city more often as the impact of climate change set in.
The sinkhole Bastone saw outside his home in July was the second one since 2021 caused by the sewer beneath Radcliff Avenue. Last summer, water from the record-setting downpours from Hurricanes Henri and Ida swelled the sewer beneath the street, causing its roof to fall in, Aggarwala said.
“Soil from above was seeping in and being washed away,” said Aggarwala. “Over time, the failure expanded to the point that a large amount of soil from above was falling in. The pressure of that failing soil, of course, also widened the hole in the roof of the sewer.”
When another pair of rainstorms hit the Bronx on July 16 and July 18 — dumping up to 1.88 inches and 1.64 inches of rain per hour, respectively — another area of the Radcliff Avenue sewer failed, causing the sinkhole that sunk the van.
A month later, crews still have the entire block shut down as they work to replace the damaged sewer and water mains that were busted in the cave-in. DEP officials plan to install a new lining material within the sewer to keep it from cracking further.
The sinkholes in Morris Park are the most obvious symptom of the area’s overstressed sewer system, but not the only one. Some residents like Ali Miah complain their homes flood whenever it rains. Miah, 31, has been living in his building’s garage for a month after storms repeatedly flooded his basement apartment.
“My place flooded after the big storm in July, and flooded several times after that, too,” Miah said. “I thought it would get better, but every time it rains it floods. My walls are soft. There’s mold all over the place.”
Councilwoman Marjorie Velazquez, who represents Morris Park, toured the area Friday with officials from the city and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which plans a new Metro-North station in the neighborhood as part of its Penn Access project.
Velazquez seeks a total replacement of the area’s sewer system — but sees the MTA’s project as an opportunity to keep water out of the sewers in the first place.
“The intensity of Ida really weakened the structure of the sewer system, and since then even the lightest rainfall will flood our communities,” Velazquez said. “As the Metro-North Penn Access expansion comes up to here, we need to think how we can develop with a design that is greener, with asphalt more permeable to make sure some water doesn’t go into the sewer system.”
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