NEW YORK — For some residents devastated by the flooding brought on by the remnants of Hurricane Ida, the city could have done more — both by sounding the alarm earlier, and by making infrastructure fixes over the years in known problem areas.

What You Need To Know

  • City Council will hold oversight hearing on preparation and response to Sept. 1 storm

  • At least four commissioners and eight city agencies in total expected to testify

  • Some critics say city could have done more to alert residents, fix infrastructure ahead of floods

  • Mayor de Blasio says city was victim of faulty weather forecasts

City officials concede they were caught off-guard, but, according to Mayor Bill de Blasio, that was because of inaccurate weather forecasts.

“I’ve looked carefully at what the projections were on Wednesday morning,” the mayor said last week. “They were not for the all-time greatest rainfall in our history.”

Now the City Council intends to get answers at an oversight hearing on Tuesday.

“Sort of doing a what-went-wrong, a post-mortem on what happened here, I think that’s important. But only if we learn from it,” said Brooklyn Councilman Justin Brannan, chair of the resiliency and waterfronts committee, who will be one of three Council members presiding over the hearing.

“Pointing fingers and saying, ‘You dropped the ball, this didn’t happen’ — that doesn’t actually fix anything.”

Brannan says the key is to have a plan moving forward. The mayor says the city needs help from the federal government to make tens of billions of dollars worth of infrastructure investments.

In the short term, de Blasio says the city will enact a more robust alert system, and possibly, travel bans and mandatory evacuations in advance of the next big storm.

At least four of de Blasio’s agency commissioners are expected to testify Wednesday, along with representatives of four other city agencies and the state-run MTA, which was also overwhelmed by the storm.

“We need to acknowledge that the extreme weather that we’ve been warned about is here,” Brannan said. “It’s here now. We’re not being warned about it anymore. It’s here at our doorstep.”

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