A surge of stormwater wiped out almost everything in Lauren Gomez’s basement on Sept. 1, 2021.

That was the day Hurricane Ida barreled through the five boroughs.

“I just kept thinking to myself that my house was either gonna fall down or the water was gonna rise all the way up. We were gonna die,” said Gomez. “Like the foundation was gonna break, I just didn’t know what to think. I just thought we were gonna die that night.”

A full year later, Gomez’s basement still looks like a construction site; unfinished and barren.

“We lost like everything. We had stuff in every room. We had stuff like stuff that could never be replaced, which was my grandmother’s stuff,” Gomez said. “We had our refrigerator freezer down here we had our deep freezer. We had a couch bed, we had the TV like she said her dresser, more bins of clothing. Like just so many things.”

She is one of over four thousand across the five boroughs who sent a claim to the city. And she’s one of over four thousand denied assistance by the city comptroller’s office.

The comptroller cites a more than century-old ruling where a judge found the city not liable for damage from extraordinary rainfall.

Gomez says damages caused by the storm racked up a bill of tens of thousands of dollars. She and her kids live in the Manor Heights section of Staten island, an area not considered to be a flood zone by her insurance company — making the struggle even more confusing to her.

“I don’t know what the point of a lot of things are. Like the insurance does nothing. File appeals. They still do nothing” said Gomez.

Gomez says she is both legally blind and on disability. Following the storm, she says FEMA gave her around $6,000 to help pay for a brief hotel stay, transportation and pay for some of the reconstruction. She says community based recovery organizations helped the family with a new boiler system and walls, but much more needs to be done.

“I have to wait and hope and pray that some agency will help me and will do the right thing by me,” Gomez said. “And that way, I will be able to rebuild our lives little by little and not have to worry about going broke by rebuilding our lives.”

The city says the Adams administration is making significant investments in infrastructure, including nearly 2 billion dollars to upgrade drainage systems in southeast queens and another 5 million in green infrastructure throughout city agencies and public spaces.