How many Empire State Buildings does it take?

To answer yesterday's question the rain we had on Wednesday would have filled the Empire State Building approximately 71 times over. To calculate that, Gothamist converted the land area for the city (321 square miles) to square feet (a little under nine billion) and then multiplied that by our estimated average rainfall (3.52 inches or 0.293 feet). That gives us a little over 2.6 billion cubic feet of rain water. Divide by the volume of the ESB (37 million cubic feet) and you get 71 Empire State Buildings worth of rain.

Other fun water facts:

Wednesday's rainfall equalled 19.6 billion gallons of water, or 163.9 billion pounds of water.

New York's average daily water consumption in 1999 was 1.113 billion gallons.

The city's reservoirs can store 547.5 billion gallons of water.

The sewer system is designed to handle 1.8 billion gallons per day.