NEW YORK — Two New York City construction workers barely escaped drowning in an elevator as storms dropped record rains over the weekend on parts of the nation’s Eastern half, washing out roads in New Jersey and forcing a small hospital in Ohio to move patients.
One of the workers, cabinetmaker Ed Tyler, of Milltown, N.J., said Monday that he and colleague Wendell Amaker, of Roselle, N.J., were happy to be alive after their ordeal.
In most spots, the effects of the rain were bad but not disastrous — sometimes narrowly so, like on New York’s Staten Island, where Tyler and Amaker were moving materials for a senior center under construction.
As rain drummed the borough about 9:30 a.m. Sunday, Tyler and Amaker were using an elevator to get supplies to a basement that, unknown to them, was filling up with floodwaters.
After they got in, the doors would not open, though they pressed buttons in vain.
“We hit the water; we heard swishing,” Tyler said. Then the water started pouring in.
“I was freaked out. The water was almost chest-high,” he said.
They feared electrocution and jumped into a rubberized utility cart they had with them. Of their two cellphones, one was wet and the other had no signal. Finally, they broke open a ceiling emergency hatch.
Almost an hour after they were trapped, one cellphone caught a signal and they called 911. In a few minutes, fire rescuers arrived, shut off power to the elevator and hoisted the men out through the ceiling hatch with a ladder.
“The firefighters told me to go home and take a shower, because the sewage pipes backed up and probably got mixed with the rainwater that came in,” Tyler said.
No deaths or serious injuries were reported from the record-breaking cloudbursts, but the region wasn’t out of the woods by midday Monday. Flood watches were in effect through the evening as far north as Rhode Island.
The slow-moving storm system was the same one that toppled a stage with its winds Saturday at the Indiana State Fair, killing five people. Its lazy pace caused the exceptional rainfall amounts, said Dave Scheibe, a meteorologist for the National Weather Service.
