Flash Flood Turns Brooklyn Staircase Into Epic Urban Waterfall (Video)

BAY RIDGE, BROOKLYN — A U.S. Postal Service deliveryman and local hero doing his rounds through South Brooklyn in the hot, pouring rain Friday morning stumbled across what appeared to be a gigantic, pop-up waterfall staged on a pedestrian stairwell at 76th Street and Colonial Road.

And lucky for the rest of us, instead of scampering back to the safety of his USPS truck, the mailman — 38-year-old Bergen Beach resident Howie Weiss — tapped into his inner National Geographic documentarian and Facebook Lived this epic collision of city grid and nature's wrath.

"I've been in this station for years and seen my flooding," Weiss told Patch, "but nothing like this. It literally took me a few seconds to comprehend how much rain that was."

Behold, the mailman's masterpiece, shot around 9 a.m. Friday, right after a rash of flash floods across NYC:

Thank you, Howie Weiss. Thank you, weird summer weather gods. Thank you, bad urban planners of NYC. For together, on an otherwise unremarkable Friday morning in the city, you made magic.

Weiss said he never got up to the top of the stairwell, which runs between two dead ends on 76th Street, to check out the monstrosity of a rain puddle that must have been feeding this thing.

"I wanted to," he said, "but I wanted to get as much work done, and I figured I wouldn't be able to have a place to stand with all that water coming down."

He did manage to snap a pic of the damage downstream, though:

Like we said — magic. No upstate nature excursion necessary.

Photos and video courtesy of Howie Weiss