Istanbul Digs Out From Its Heaviest Rain on Record — With More Floods Forecast Through Saturday

ISTANBUL

Istanbul is cleaning up from the heaviest rain in its recorded history while being told, plainly, that more is on the way. Flash floods triggered by record downpours on October 14 killed at least three people, left six others missing, stranded thousands across Turkiye's largest city and diverted dozens of flights. Schools are closed through the weekend, thousands of emergency workers are still in the streets, and a fresh weather warning running from Friday morning through late Saturday night has put a city that has barely drained on alert for a second round of flooding, landslides and travel disruption.

The human toll was set out Thursday by Interior Minister Mustafa Ciftci at a briefing at the AFAD disaster agency headquarters. One person died by electrocution and two drowned, he said, and search teams were still looking for five missing people in Istanbul and one more in neighboring Kocaeli province. The disaster agency said its crews rescued 3,055 people who had been stranded by the water. Among the accounts reported by AFP was a 14-year-old boy electrocuted after stepping into a puddle in the Balat district, a detail that underlines how ordinary streets became dangerous in a matter of minutes once power, water and traffic mixed.

Rain that rewrote the record book

By the measures officials are using, this was not a bad storm on a familiar scale. Istanbul Governor Davut Gul said the city recorded its highest rainfall since records began in 1942. Ciftci put the heaviest totals at as much as 272 kilograms of rain per square meter in parts of the city, and the metropolitan municipality said some districts had seen their heaviest rainfall since 1985. However those baselines are reconciled, the picture they paint together is the same: water arrived faster than a dense, largely paved megacity could move it, and it collected exactly where modern cities are most vulnerable — underpasses, low-lying roads, ground floors, schools and hospitals.

The damage count is still being assembled, but the early inventory is broad. Reporting on the response put more than 800 homes and 280 businesses damaged, along with dozens of vehicles, and said floodwater breached two hospitals. Emergency services fielded thousands of weather-related calls and reports, including well over a thousand floods and a number of landslides. In the Sultangazi district, a primary school retaining wall collapsed while pupils were inside classrooms. Roads buckled in Eyupsultan and Gaziosmanpasa, leaving drivers stranded, and in some of the most widely shared images from the storm, passengers climbed through the roof hatches of a bus as water rose around it while bystanders pulled a woman to safety moments before the current took her.

Flights diverted, roads closed, motorcycles banned

For travelers, Istanbul's week has been a case study in how quickly a weather event becomes an aviation event. The transport ministry said 43 flights bound for Istanbul Airport were diverted on Wednesday, and later travel reporting put the diverted total above 50 with further cancellations, while operations at Sabiha Gokcen Airport on the city's Asian side were temporarily suspended and a small number of flights were sent to Ankara instead. Airport operations have since resumed after the temporary interruptions, but resumed is not the same as normal: crews, aircraft and passengers displaced midweek do not snap back into a schedule just because a runway reopens.

On the ground, the governor's office banned motorcycles and other two-wheeled vehicles from the roads from Wednesday evening until further notice — a measure aimed at the road users most exposed to standing water, debris and sudden washouts. Authorities deployed roughly 8,000 emergency personnel and about 2,000 vehicles and pieces of heavy machinery, closed roads across the city at the height of the flooding, suspended classes and urged residents to stay home unless a trip was absolutely necessary. Those are not precautions a city takes for a passing shower; they are the posture of a city treating its road network itself as a hazard.

Why Friday and Saturday matter

The reason this story is not only a cleanup story is the forecast pinned to the weekend. Turkiye's General Directorate of Meteorology issued a warning on October 15 for renewed heavy rainfall beginning Friday morning, October 16, expecting conditions to deteriorate overnight with intense rain spreading across Istanbul on Saturday. The warning window runs from 9 a.m. Friday until 11:59 p.m. Saturday local time, with flash flooding, landslides, lightning and transportation disruption all named as risks. Ground that is already saturated drains more slowly, drains and culverts already tested once are carrying debris into the second event, and neighborhoods that spent Thursday pumping out ground floors face the prospect of doing it again before they have finished.

That sequencing — a record event followed inside 72 hours by a second warning — is also what makes the travel advice unusually simple and unusually firm. Anyone flying to, from or through Istanbul this weekend should treat their flight status as provisional, check with their airline before leaving for the airport and allow extra time for transfers on roads that may close again with little notice. Anyone in the city should avoid underpasses and low-lying areas during heavy bursts, stay off two wheels while the ban stands, and take official warnings about staying indoors seriously rather than as boilerplate. Istanbul has already shown this week what its heaviest rain on record does to a normal commute.

What happens next

The immediate priorities are the search for the six missing people, the cleanup across hundreds of damaged homes and businesses, and keeping schools closed until buildings and routes are safe for a Monday return. The larger question, which Turkish officials will be answering long after the water recedes, is how a city of more than 15 million people absorbs rainfall totals its drainage was never designed for — and how often it will be asked to. For now, the city waits on Saturday's rain with pumps still running from Wednesday's. More of the night's weather, including Hurricane Trudy off Mexico, is in our earlier report on Trudy's approach to the Pacific coast, and the day's travel disruption is rounded up in our Italy strike coverage.