Last week, two tornadoes and a "macro-burst" flew across NY Harbor, through Brooklyn and Queens, finally heading out northeastward towards Long Island Sound..
Running on a line roughly parallel with a line drawn between the Verrazano Bridge and the Whitestone Bridge, the system apparently passed right over my building.
Here are some pics.
Here's the side entrance to my apartment building, the driveway to the underground garage is at the curb in the foreground.
Our rear entrance, patio furniture all over the place.
The street on the other side of the building and my neighbor's car........ 🙁
The street on our side......streets for about a ten or twelve block radius looked pretty much the same.
It took me five hours to get home that night. (Usually less than an hour trip.) They had closed the Long Island expressway about two miles east of us, due to downed trees, and the Grand Central Parkway was closed due to a fatal accident investigation (tree fell on a car). At rush hour, those are the two main roads for folks to get home to Queens and Long Island from Manhattan, so it was basically gridlock for central and eastern Queens.
Surprisingly, the twister must have passed within half a mile of Citifield, yet the Mets were able to take the field with only a fifteen minute delay.
Part of Forest Hills is apartment buildings, and part is private homes. The next night, on our way home, we spotted this tree which fell more or less between two relatively lucky homeowners.
Well, no patio eating this week. Luckily, we only had three broken windows (outer pane of double paned , so no exposure to the elements. The upstairs neighbor told us that everyone's patio furniture was spinning around about five feet in the air!
The super told me that a portion of our building's roof peeled off like a bed-sheet, and one apartment is not habitable.
Not quite the devastation of a Great Plains twister, but then again, we don't expect those kinds of things around here.
Welcome to my world. 'Cept we don't have those brown and green thingies like what's resting on yon auto-voiture.
At least you didn't have this:
That's the Westin Peachtree Plaza Hotel in downtown ATL. I heard that in just the last couple of weeks they finally got all the windows replaced after 2 and a half years. It happened Easter in 2008.
I think there was a few of you here during the big college basketball games at the Georgia Dome that night.
Thanks for posting those photos. Interesting indeed to see how you city folks live. There are more people living on your block (and maybe in your building) than live in my whole county of over 50,000 square miles of area.
We get different disasters here, and we care more about our critters and the fruit crop than our patio furniture (if we could afford any), but I'll take that over what you got.
I hope nobody got hurt.
BC
Wow that is just crazy to see that kind of weather in NY!! Glad you are OK. Your brick building and the rest of the neighborhood looks very beautiful & historic otherwise. 🙂
Your last picture looks the after math of a frat party.
Ouch on your neighbors car..
Deral
Note that they have no porch roofs on which to climb to watch the tornader. Maybe they climb to the room of those tall buildings with a case of beer. I would get winded and not make it to the roof in time.
We've go two apartment buildings on our block....ours has seven stories, 131 apartments.
The other one (seen with white columns in the last photo above) has six stories and about 110 apartments.
I'd figure an average of three people per unit, so you can figure the population of one typical block.
This is typical of the immediate area, although the taller buildings in the background of one photo are 21 stories and have hundreds of units.
Damage was more severe in areas "upstream" and "downstream" of the tornado path, as there are mostly blocks of private homes, and many more trees. The area where a woman in a car was killed looks like someone came through with a giant machete and sliced through the trees on the hillside, in a 100 foot wide swath.
