Possible Tornado Rocks NYC

Updated at 8:30 p.m.

By Tamer El-Ghobashy and Chris Herring

A flash storm that followed tornado warnings powered through New York City Thursday evening, with winds up to 70 miles per hour knocking down trees, damaging buildings, destroying cars and causing the death of at least one person.

The severe weather wreaked havoc on the city’s transportation system in the middle of the evening commute. All Long Island Rail Road service was suspended out of Manhattan due to downed trees on the tracks near Sunnyside, Queens. LIRR service was also disrupted between Brooklyn and Queens, and the entire 7 subway line was inoperative for several hours.

Several roadways were closed to vehicular traffic because of the debris. A woman was killed when a tree toppled onto her vehicle on the Grand Central Parkway near Jewel Avenue, authorities said.

Associated Press
Residents in the Park Slope neighborhood of Brooklyn examine some of the damage after Thursday’s storm.

The storm also knocked out power to more than 24,000 customers in Queens and 4,800 households in Staten Island, according to Con Edison. More than 570 customers were without power in Brooklyn. New Jersey power authorities said about 40,000 households were without electricity in the wake of the storm.

Nearly an hour after the storm passed, 911 switchboards were inundated with calls of injuries but it was unclear just how many were considered serious, a spokesman for the Fire Department said. The spokesman said several firefighters responded to scenes in Queens and Brooklyn where motorists were stuck in their vehicles after having trees fall on them.

Aaron Donovan, a Metropolitan Transportation Authority spokesman, urged LIRR passengers to “sit tight for the moment” and not head to Penn Station or Jamaica. New passengers were being turned away from Penn Station, he said.

The MTA was mobilizing shuttle buses to take LIRR passengers from the station in Jamaica, Queens, to points east, but Donovan urged passengers not to go to Jamaica because of limited bus capacity.

While a tornado was never officially declared, a trained weather spotter reported seeing a funnel cloud about two miles north-northeast of Staten Island’s Huguenot neighborhood, according to National Weather Service spokesman Sean Potter. Wind speeds of 70 mph were estimated for Staten Island, while parts of Brooklyn saw sustained 60 mph winds, Potter said.

Brandon Smith, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service’s office in Upland, N.Y., said the agency received “lots of reports of damage in Staten Island, Brooklyn and Queens” in the wake of the storm. “Primarily tree damage, large branches all over the place,” he said.

Smith said that National Weather Service officials would need to wait for daylight to return before they could inspect the storm damage to determine if, in fact, a tornado hit the city. “The way the damage lies on the ground can give you a lot of hints,” he explained. “In a tornado, you can see the indications of rotation in the debris.”

But city residents weren’t waiting for an official determination. “Very very windy,” said fruit vendor Abul Kashem, 35, who lost about $800 dollars worth of fruit to the storm when his cart near Brooklyn’s Grand Army Plaza was tipped over. He insisted the winds were a “tornado, tornado.”

“I’m lucky I am safe,” said Kashem, who took cover under construction scaffolding that eventually collapsed, forcing him to hide in the vestibule of a brownstone building. “My fruit cart, it flew away.”

Carolyn Davis returned to her home in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood to find massive damage. “The roof in the back from what I can see was completely ripped up. The skylight is busted in,” she said.

Evidence of the damage caused by the possible tornado could be found online minutes after the tornado warning expired at 6 p.m. A photo posted on Twitter’s image-sharing service showed what appeared to be structural damage at the Wyckoff Heights Medical Center in Brooklyn. A photo posted on Flickr showed an SUV crushed by a downed tree in Brooklyn, as well as significant sidewalk damage.

http://blogs.wsj.com/metropolis/2010/09/16/possible-tornado-rocks-brooklyn-queens-and-staten-island/