NYC NOW - Midday News: City Taking Landlords to Court Over Rats, Rain Stretches Into Friday, and New Reports Say Newark Controllers Briefly Lost Contact with Planes

Episode Date: May 6, 2025

Sanitation officials are taking landlords to court over rat-infested lots. In Harlem, a judge let the city into a trash-covered property after the owner ignored orders. Officials say they’ve done this nine times this year. Meanwhile, rain is expected through Friday, with multiple rounds of showers moving through the region. Plus, new reporting this morning from various outlets including Bloomberg and the New York Times say air traffic controllers briefly lost communication with planes at Liberty Newark Airport last week.

Welcome to NYC Now, your source for local news in and around New York City from WMYC. It's Tuesday, May 6th. Here's the midday news from Michael Hill. Sanitation inspectors are using a new technique to wage Mayor Adams' war on rats going to court. WNYC's Liam Quigley reports. There's a plot of land on Frederick Douglas Boulevard and West 149th Street in Harlem that sat empty for more than 10 years. Health and sanitation officials say the site has conditions that are perfect for rats.

They found overgrown shrubs, litter, and piles of trash bags. But they say the landlord ignored orders to clean up the lot, so they convinced a judge to let them in. Sanitation officials say they've gone to court nine times this year to gain access to rat-infested properties. A message left with the landlord was not returned, and city officials say the landlord will be receiving a bill for the cleanup. It might be a good idea to keep that umbrella handy this week.

Cool, wet weather, expected to continue in the New York area for the next several days. This is according to the National Weather Service. Meteorologist Brian Ramsey says several slow-moving systems will bring showers today tomorrow and Thursday evening into Friday. We kind of keep that wet pattern until Friday night. and then we finally dry out, and it looks like to stay dry for the weekend. That's for the Mother's Day weekend. Ramsey says temperatures will stay below average for most of this week in the 60s. Saturday and Sunday should be sunny and dries, he said, with clear skies

and temps in the mid-70s forecast for Mother's Day. Right now, 61 and cloudy, showers likely, and chances of thunderstorms this afternoon, patchy fog, a high near 68, winds gusting to 20. miles an hour. Stick around. There's more to come. New reporting this morning from various outlets, including Bloomberg and the New York Times, say air traffic controllers briefly lost communication with planes at Newark Liberty Airport last week. The disclosure attributed to the National Air Traffic Controllers Union comes amid growing alarm over an increasing number of hours-long delays in cancellations. It also comes the same week

the United Airlines cut 35 daily flights from the airport. Jason Rabinowitz is an aviation expert and the co-hosts of Flight Radar 24's AvTalk podcast. He joins us now. Jason, equipment issues, worker shortages, landing strip shortages, what's going on at Newark Liberty? Basically, you just summarized it there. It's everything that can go wrong at Newark right now is going wrong. And when you have this many factors between air traffic controller shortages, equipment failures with the FAA, air traffic controllers walking out, and if anyone looks out the window today, weather, an airport like Newark just can't take all of those stresses at once,

and it's been absolute misery for passengers, not just flying in and out of Newark, but anyone on an aircraft that may have looked at Newark's airspace, the day prior even. It's really quite something right now. Equipment shortages. What are we talking about? So the equipment shortages, it's really more, equipment issues with the FAA. So last year in a move to boost air traffic controllers managing New

York's airspace, the FAA moved controllers from the New York Center on Long Island down to Philadelphia. The reasoning behind that would be it's easier to hire controllers at Philly. They have a higher level of staffing to begin with and the cost of living there is lower so you'll be able to hire more controllers. Good idea in theory and practice, it has turned out to be nothing short of it, a disaster for Newark operations. Right on the onset, since summer last year, Labor Day, there have been a number of major equipment failures with that system down in Philly to remotely pipe in the air traffic control feed from the New York Center to Philly. And when that happens, air traffic control basically stops for Newark airspace. Nothing comes in, nothing goes out.

Anything on the way into Newark just kind of holds. That has created some major, major failures in Newark Airspace to the point where we have seen reports of up to 20% of the air traffic controllers managing that airspace have gone out on long-term disability because of the stress caused by those failures. Jason, are you summing up that this is a dangerous situation? I don't know if you could call it a dangerous situation. In those brief moments where the system goes down and you're basically left without air traffic controllers managing those flights, in those briefs,

brief moments, it could potentially be dangerous. Outside of that in your normal day-to-day operation, it's not really dangerous so much as it is catastrophic for airline flight schedules and passengers trying to get from A to B. What's up with the landing strip that we pointed out? What's the issue there? So there you have the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey rehabilitating one of the two major runways at Newark. So Newark only has two main parallel runways and basically another let's say half a runway that is perpendicular to the other runways. Since March 1st through April 14th, they had weekend closures of it, and we saw some impacts on Saturdays. But since April 14th through, I believe, June 15th, that runway is closed

24-7. So that impacts every flight in and out of Newark all hours, all days. So until June 15th, Newark is down one of its main runways. So at best, you can hope Newark will have one and a half runways throw in some weather or any kind of other operational issue, Newark is essentially a single runway airport, and it cannot function anywhere near what the airlines have scheduled with one single runway. Jason, should air travelers avoid Newark at this time? Absolutely. If you can, please go out of your way to avoid Newark at least up until June 15th when that runway is closed full time. There is a brief period during the summer where all the runways should be open. So there will be a respite between June 16th and I think September 1st.

But after September 1st, we have that weekend closure again. But certainly, if at all possible through June 15th, do not fly through Newark. If your airline has a waiver in place, take them up on it, use one of our other airports. I've been speaking with aviation expert, Jason Rabinowitz, who always has a lot of answers for us. Jason, thank you. Come back and see us again. Thanks for having me. The Port Authority says it's invested billions of dollars to modernize New York Liberty, but those improvements depend on a fully staffed and modern federal air traffic system. It says it's urging the FAA to address staffing shortages in upgrade technology.

The FAA says our antiquated air traffic control system is affecting our workforce. It says it's working to ensure telecommunications equipment in the area is more reliable by working with local exchange carriers and to train more air traffic controllers. It says when issues do occur, it will slow the rate of arrivals into the airport to ensure safety. Thanks for listening. This is NYC now from WMYC. Check us out for updates every weekday, three times a date for the latest news headlines and occasional deep dives. And subscribe wherever you get your podcast.