By Stephen Nessen and Ramsey Khalifeh, Gothamist
Manhattan’s precolonial topography is to blame for the 28th Street Station subway geyser that bursts with bubbling water during heavy rain.
The manhole cover on the subway platform flooded in spectacular fashion, yet again, during Monday’s storm. MTA Chair Janno Lieber blamed the phenomenon on the city’s aging sewer system, which proved incapable of handling the more than 2 inches of rain that fell in a single hour that night.
A topographical map of New York City from 1865 shows that the station at 28th Street and Seventh Avenue was built on marshland, with water flowing in from multiple blocks.
But the same sewers also handled rainwater at every other station across the city, where flooding seldom reaches the same levels. That’s because Manhattan’s primordial terrain makes the 28th Street station uniquely vulnerable.
“Before there was 28th Street there was a forest and in that forest there was a wetland, and it turns out that the 1 train stop at 28th Street is right smack in the middle of that wetland,” said Eric Sanderson, the vice president for Urban Conservation Center for Conservation and Restoration Ecology at the New York Botanic Garden.
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