aftermath

[miss_porcupine]

When the storm hit at about 5:20 p.m. Thursday, New Yorkers scrambled for cover from torrential rain, hail the size of nickels, and powerful winds.

The sky turned a sickening shade of green as the destructive winds blew in, toppling a church steeple, blowing out windows and mowing down a forest's worth of trees.

Pictures of the wreckageBy quirk

Comments

[dajaje]

Wow, what a mess. Very lucky there was only one fatality.

Glad you're safe, even if you were stuck with a bad commute.

[miss_porcupine]

Yeah. I have a really long walk after finishing with public transit and... lots of heavy things were on the ground already by the time I had to walk that path. I'd rather it not have been "during."

[anonymous]

It is never good when the sky turns green; green sky = get the fuck inside NOW! Excrement is hitting the oscillating blades in a matter of minutes.

Was it an actual tornado or merely (hah!) a nasty windstorm?

[miss_porcupine]

The NOAA is actually sending people here to determine if we had a proper tornado. We get them once a decade, but nothing like the midwest in scope.

[lurkerlynne]

There's very little difference between a minor tornado and a nasty windstorm when you get down to it. Stuff's strewn everywhere, trees are down, houses and vehicles damaged, locals dealing as best they can.

As a former midwesterner, I can imagine the shock of it is worse since this doesn't happen often.

[uminohikari]

SCREAM WHAT. I-I'm glad you're okay and that there were so few fatalities...

(My reaction is mostly because half the people I know are in NYC right now D:)

[lizbet0]

Green skies are seriously freaky! I'm glad so few were killed (and hopefully, very few injured as well.) I am abashed to admit that I had no idea NYC had that many substantial trees outside of Central Park. {blush}

Glad you're safe, although I'm sorry for the wretched commute.

[miss_porcupine]

We are actually pretty leafy, especially in the outer boroughs, although Manhattan has plenty of street trees (trees not on someone's yard). I go through four dozen lawn bags each fall just raking my property. There's a very mature tree down on my block causing a de facto roadblock and half of a tree is hanging on the main trunk phone cables for my block, which has all of us a little worried.

[em_kellesvig]

Yikes! I'm so glad you're safe. That's fairly common here in the Midwest but I thought you all on the East Coast didn't get weather like that. If it wasn't a tornado, it was certainly straight line winds. Those maybe worse. *shudders*

[miss_porcupine]

We don't really get tornadoes -- about once a decade. Hail more frequently, but not common. This one, whatever it was (they're still arguing) cut through Staten Island, Brooklyn, and Queens on a NE path, bypassing Manhattan and the Bronx, although they still got soaked. City services are just overwhelmed with the tree disposal, infrastructure repair, and so forth.