Flash flooding tore through a Queens community Thursday, and now neighbors are cleaning up and demanding answers. 

Retaining wall between home, LIRR tracks collapses

The Long Island Rail Road restored service Friday on the Port Washington Branch after Thursday's severe flooding brought trains to a halt. 

The morning commute got off to a shaky start. Screens at the Bayside station showed canceled trains to Penn Station and Grand Central Terminal until about 6 a.m. Once the MTA was able to get service back on track, the sound of trains pulling into the station was music to commuters' ears.

"Yeah, we're in good shape, and back to work. It's the most exciting thing to happen to Bayside," Dan Sheffer said. 

Sheffer's attitude was a far cry from what many riders expressed on Thursday, when many were dealing with the extreme weather. 

Thursday, the FDNY was called to help commuters who were trapped inside a train just outside Bayside, where flooding blocked much of the line.

On the other side of the tracks, a green lawn was overtaken by a rocky avalanche.

Dierdre Agapakis says she warned the MTA two years ago about what looked then like a leaky retaining wall between her home and the tracks.

"They said they would keep maintenance and have it assessed pretty often ... but that was the last time I heard from them," she said.

The MTA told us "MTA crews conducted an initial inspection of the resident's property and will be assessing next steps."

"With a kid at home, it's just unsafe," Agapakis said.

Yards, basements flood in Queens

Next door on 41st Road, Bob DeMarco's basement flooded.

"It just kept washing through, washing through. It was like a river," he said.

His carpet is slowly drying, and now that the water has receded, he has to parse through stacks of disintegrated cardboard boxes.

One door down, Tinley Choeden's backyard is also torn up. A pipe between her property and the train tracks is broken.

"It was ... really like gushing water coming from here and from there," she said.

As if the damage alone wasn't painful enough, she's also nursing a three-inch cut on her elbow. Choeden says she came out in the storm to check the flood and fell into a hole on the sidewalk left by utility crews a few weeks ago.

"I didn't realize that this one was open and I fell right in," she said.

The metal plate that had been covering it, she says, had been swept away by the water. She managed to get out by pulling herself up with one hand.

A challenging week for riders

When it came to transit, many couldn't help but think about what a challenging week it has been in the New York City area. In addition to flooding, at least two power outages impacted several subway lines. 

"The big picture has been good ... This is not the 'summer of hell,'" MTA Chair and CEO Janno Lieber said at a Friday news conference. "What we've experienced is the challenge of having really old infrastructure and being subject to the water that comes from all over, down onto tracks and hitting the subway and commuter rail system ... So we've got to fix that. We have to work with our partners in municipalities, especially the City of New York, to keep the water out so we don't have these impacts on transit."

"The water was up to the platform here at Bayside and just east of Bayside, as you go to Great Neck, there was another flooding condition," LIRR President Rob Free said. "I just want to emphasize, as well, that our system is resilient. It's constructed in a way that can accommodate water that emulates and accumulates on our property. But when you introduce storm runoff water from the surrounding areas -- thousands of gallons rushing onto our property -- it cannot keep up with it."