New Yorkers in Exile

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1 Dead as Tornado-Like Storm Rips Through the Region
27,000 NYC households without power; 40,000 in New Jersey
By MICHAEL CLANCY
Updated 8:57 PM EDT, Thu, Sep 16, 2010

A short but violent tornado-like storm swept through New York City and parts of New Jersey on Thursday, uprooting trees and damaging cars and causing at least one fatality and widespread property damage and power outages.

The evening storm walloped Brooklyn and Queens knocking down trees and sending residents scrambling. The storm hit just after 5 p.m., when the National Weather Service issued a tornado warning for Staten Island. Shortly afterward, warnings were issued for Brooklyn and Queens. As of 8 pm:


Con Edison is reporting 30,000 households without power in the five boroughs including 25,000 in Queens and 6,000 in Staten Island. As of 7:30 pm, power lines were still on fire in Queens.

40,000 New Jersey households were without power. Jersey Central Power and Light said about 12,000 customers had no service, with areas of western Monmouth County and northern Ocean county among the hardest hit. 10,000 PSE&G customers in north Jersey had no service, while about 17,300 Atlantic City Electric customers were in the dark.

One person is reported dead after a tree fell down and crushed a parked car on the Grand Central Parkway near Jewel Avenue. The driver, an unidentified woman, pulled over on the side of the road to escape the rain. A tractor trailer overturned on the Gowanus Expressway, according to eyewitness accounts.

the FDNY reported 500 emergency calls in the two hours following the storm

Long Island Rail Road service has suspended from Penn Station to Jamaica and Penn Station and Port Washington. Limited eastbound service is available from Jamaica. Penn Station was mobbed and police were directing riders to trains and buses.

Service for departures and arrivals at LaGuardia, Newark and JFK airports was delayed two to three hours.

The National Weather Service has not yet confirmed the massive storm as a tornado yet although many witnesses have reported spotting funnel clouds. And winds of up to 80 miles-per-hour were reported.
Sideways rain, black clouds and fierce howling winds caused major damage to Staten Island, Brooklyn, Queens and parts of Long Island. Park Slope, Prospect Heights, Crown Heights and Bushwick in Brooklyn, and Flushing and Ridgewood in Queens seemed to be hit particularly hard.

A Tornado Grows in Brooklyn?

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A Tornado Grows in Brooklyn?

In the Park Slope, witnesses say the streets went pitch black at about 5:30 p.m. Trees started waving around like leaves of grass. Large branches snapped and hit cars, smashing windshields.

A huge tree limb, like 25 feet long, flew right up the street, up the hill and stopped in the middle of the air 50 feet up in this intersection and started spinning," said Steve Carlisle, 54. "It was like a poltergeist."

"Then all the garbage cans went up in the air and this spinning tree hits one of them like it was a bat on a ball. The can was launched way, way over there," he said, pointing at a building about 120 feet away where a metal garbage can lay flattened.

Townsend Davis, 47, stood outside of his home on Sterling Place in Brooklyn. A 40-foot tree that was uprooted from the sidewalk and crushed two cars still had a sign in the soil around its roots that read "Respect the trees."

"Someone up there wasn't listening," Davis said. "I'm just glad it fell that way, as bad as I feel for the owners of that car, because if it fell this way, my house wouldn't be here."

Davis' children and wife were in the home when the storm hit.

"All of a sudden, we saw this dark cloud, and it was moving. I said 'Let's go in!'" said Stephen Wylie, who was working in a backyard on Quincy Street, in Brooklyn.

Within seconds, the front door started lashing back and forth. Trees branches were falling and trees came flying from other yards, Wylie said.

http://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local-beat/Tornado-Warning-Issued-for-Eastern-New-York-City-103086814.html