Eltingville’s Ice Sheet Returns Days After DEP Cleanup, Mystery Leak Outpaces City Fix

An intractable sidewalk ice problem on Staten Island highlights both the limits of municipal quick fixes and the wider struggles New York faces in maintaining its subterranean infrastructure.

The residents of East Figurea Avenue in Eltingville, Staten Island, have learned to measure winter not just by the thermometer, but by the thickness of ice encasing their sidewalks and car tires. For weeks in January, a glacial sheet several inches thick lay stubbornly across driveways and footpaths, a hazard so persistent that even postal workers and sanitation crews hesitated to brave its slippery expanse. When city workers finally arrived, armed with tools and salt, the icy mass briefly vanished—only to return within a day, as if mocking the city’s efforts.

At the heart of this seasonal drama lies a confounding leak somewhere beneath the asphalt. Last week, the Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) dispatched crews to East Figurea, excavating frozen rills, clearing hydrants, and scattering generous helpings of salt—a six-hour exercise in municipal perseverance. Yet, as the salt crusted and the ice briefly receded, it became clear that the underlying cause remained untouched and undiagnosed.

The persistence of the hazard is more than a mere inconvenience. The continuous water flow and subsequent ice formation have trapped residents, particularly the elderly and those with mobility issues, within their own homes. Essential city services—garbage collection, mail delivery—have been sporadically interrupted, prompting some to wonder, only half in jest, whether snowshoes might soon be issued along with utility bills.

For Staten Islanders, the episode is a familiar, if exasperating, reflection of the city’s relationship with its aging water infrastructure. Underground leaks, when coupled with frigid temperatures, transform ordinary residential blocks into minor skating rinks with alarming regularity. The city’s labyrinth of pipes, some dating to the days when horses vastly outnumbered cars, runs beneath nearly every thoroughfare, quietly and often invisibly decaying.

These icy events are not mere irritants; they expose weaknesses that reach far beyond a single neighbourhood. If the cause of the Eltingville leak proves elusive for the better part of a winter, one wonders what similarly slow-motion failures may be lurking elsewhere in New York’s 6,800 miles of water mains. According to the DEP’s own figures, the city averages roughly 400 water main breaks a year—damp reminders that maintenance often struggles to keep abreast of need.

Such infrastructure headaches carry consequences that ripple through the city’s budget and political calculus. Emergency fixes—digging, salting, plumbing—are far more expensive than regular, proactive repairs. Nationally, the American Society of Civil Engineers pegs the annual cost of aging water systems at over $3 billion in emergency expenditures. In New York, these surprise ice sheets portend both increased municipal costs and voter dissatisfaction when apparent quick fixes, quite literally, fail to stick.

When infrastructure thaws, politics gets slippery

For ordinary New Yorkers, the inconvenience and risk posed by sidewalk ice is tangible and immediate. For City Hall, however, these stories summon broader questions about investment and priorities. Mayor Eric Adams, whose administration has made much of “getting stuff done,” now faces the less photogenic challenge of addressing infrastructure that is out of sight and too often out of mind—until it migrates, via frozen runoff, directly into public view.

The city’s response thus far has been characteristically piecemeal. While the DEP promises further investigation—with a nod to both the urgency and opacity of the problem—the underlying pattern bodes ill. Residents recount previous years where similar leaks froze, thawed, and refroze, suggesting that unless root causes are addressed, the cycle is set to repeat until spring or until pipes are properly repaired, whichever comes last.

This Staten Island tale is, of course, not unique to New York. Older North American cities from Boston to Toronto contend with similar wintertime dilemmas: the interplay of decaying infrastructure, delayed maintenance, and the climatic realities of a northern metropolis. Even London, with its Victorian mains, faces winter surges in pipe failures—though its famously balmier winters grant respite from Staten Island’s sidewalk ice.

What distinguishes New York, however, is the scale, visibility, and cost. With capital budgets under strain and federal infrastructure dollars filtered through competitive grant processes, the city is left to triage: prioritise high-profile bursts in Manhattan and Brooklyn, or send crews repeatedly to the same frosted corner of Eltingville? The city’s millions depend on the daily, mostly reliable miracle of running water; it is the exceptional breakdowns—like this recurring Staten Island glacier—that lay bare the fragility of that achievement.

We reckon that, however paltry a single icy sidewalk may seem in the metropolis’s ledger of woes, it is a microcosm of the cost of deferred maintenance writ large. Proactive investment in buried infrastructure often loses out to shinier, more photogenic projects. Yet, as the residents of East Figurea have learned, the price of delay is paid not merely in tax dollars, but in broken routines, disrupted services, and the fraying of civic trust.

New York cannot salt away its troubles indefinitely. Addressing the periodic reappearance of East Figurea Ave’s ice, and the thousands of other micro-failures citywide, will take not just diligent crews but sustained, unglamorous spending on pipes nobody sees—at least until the next leak surfaces on a cold January morning. ■