I'm in Forest Hills, and something just blew through here. I think it was a tornado.
I was taking a walk. Some thunder started up, and some lightening. Though it hadn't started raining, I thought this was a good time to go inside and do some of my errands. I went into the Rite-Aid on Continental Avenue and couldn't find what I was looking for. Went a few doors down to Duane Reade and had gathered up my purchases and was just about to step into the check-out line at the front of the store, when when there was a loud noise, and everyone jumped or at least looked up, startled, which was itself unusual as very little fazes New Yorkers. I was near the door and the plate glass front windows and decided to back off a bit.
Some people were saying that a tree had gone down. I'm gotten used to NY weather enough to know that nothing lasts very long (unlike in S.F., where once it starts to rain it may not stop until weeks later), so I thought I would just hang out in the store for 10 or 15 minutes and by then it would be over. I thought I would browse the greeting cards to kill some time, since I'm trying to start up my freelance card-writing gig again, but I ended up shopping in the the make-up aisle instead. This seemed like it could be dangerous to my wallet -- the more time I spent hanging out in the store, the more stuff I was buying -- so after I went through the check-out line for the second time for my second purchase and saw that it looked as if the rain had stopped, I went outside.
And was completely unprepared for what I saw.
It wasn't just one tree that was down. It was half the trees on the block. The huge sign on the bank across the street had crashed to the ground. Glass was everywhere. Doors and windows were cracked, and the long back glass wall of the bus shelter had blown out completely and lay shattered in tiny pieces on the street.
As a woman standing next to me said, it looked like a war zone.
I made it across Queens Boulevard -- more trees down, more glass -- to the library. Everything is quiet now.
Someone said they heard from someone who heard on the news that it was a tornado.
I feel lucky I was in the store when I was. I heard a scary story from someone who had been in the Chase branch (which has floor to celiling plate glass windows along two sides) who said the glass was buckling.
Now that I think about it, it's kind of a miracle that there is power here. If this had happened in S.F., the power would have been off for days. I guess the power lines are mostly underground here.
I wish I had a phone in my camera so I could have taken a picture, but I'll see if I can find one online.
It's ironic -- I thought I was escaping the danger of natural disasters when I left S.F. No earthquakes in N.Y! I thought I was trading my protection from natural disaters for an increased risk of terrorist attack. But never did I imagine that I would be dodging tornados.
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| The only tornado I've ever seen before was in "The Wizard of Oz" (screenshot via The Horror Digest) |
Editing to add: I wrote the post above at the library. On the way back home, I saw that many, even most of the trees in the little park where I sometimes sit were broken. Very sad -- it was a little oasis of greenery in a sea of brick, concrete, and 16 lanes of traffic. And when I got home, I found that my bedroom wall was badly cracked. Since this is a co-op, not a rental, I may be responsible for getting it fixed. So now this is all less like a novel adventure, and more like a big hassle.
I'm very thankful I wasn't here when it happened. Many of the windows in the building blew out, and things were flying around the apartments. People were very scared. I think if I had been here alone, I would have been terrified. Where I was, was probably one of the best places to have been.
(Editing again to add): I'm starting to find some pictures:
here,
here, and
here.
Update: The Weather Service announced that there were two tornadoes that day, one in Brooklyn with 80 mph winds and the other in Queens with 100 mph. But, get this, the thing that blew through Forest Hills was
worse than a tornado -- the winds in that thing were 125 mph. The Weather Service is calling it a "microburst," which is a terrible name, in my opinion. It refers to the small area that the wind monster covered (a mere 1.5 by 5 miles), but it makes it sound as if the storm itself was something minor, less than a tornado. If they called it a Nasty Scary Mega Burst, that would have been more satisfying.
Update: Now the official weather people are calling it a "macroburst," which is better than "microburst," though still not evocative enough of what actually happened.
Update: I found a photo of the little park I mentioned above, where most of the big trees were destroyed. This photo looks like it was taken after most of the debris was already cleared away:
