The Forest Hills Macroburst

There was something markedly different about the warning I got on my weatherbug app last Thursday. Call it a feeling or whatever, but I had this sense of "uh oh..." was coming. I ignored it thinking there's no way something that terrible could be on its way.

But I decided to ignore my gut....until the electricity started to flicker. The combination of the weather warning, the power and my gut finally got me off my butt to close the windows. As soon as I stood up from the chair to start locking down my apartment, the rain started to pound down in sheets. It was the most intense storm I had ever seen in my entire life. I couldn't see anything out my window, literally. Visibility was zero. The wind was howling against the building, my cats were freaking out. Bad bad deal man.

Once the storm had passed I checked the radar on my phone and saw this whole thing was moving in a straight line across Long Island.  I sent Anna a text asking where she was and what she was doing. She was staying late after school for set crew. When I got a hold of her she was just leaving school. I told her that there was a gigantic storm coming her way. She then clicked over to Rachel (coworker) who lives in Bayside and Rachel told her there was a big storm coming her way. Anna had just turned onto the road when the rain started and she turned right back around into the parking lot.

I stayed on the phone with her for the length of the storm and she hung up to drive home. I went outside to see what I could see. First thing I saw were my garbage cans littered throughout the front yard, driveway and street. I collected them and put them back along the side of the house. That's when I noticed a very healthy looking Christmas Tree across the street. But it isn't Christmas time. Not even retail stores can get away with Christmas right now. Thanksgiving, sure. Christmas? Me no think so.

I actually had a really hard time trying to figure out where the hell this came from. Because one wouldn't necessarily conceive that the top of a tree had been ripped off the tree itself and thrown across the street. But that's indeed what had happened. I didn't figure it out until the owner of the Saab that almost had the tree embedded into his trunk pointed up at the top of the tree. Not only that but the tree had actually done a flip or two in the air because the end that was broken off was facing the other way from the tree. When I looked further down the street, I noticed that a tree was uprooted and laying on an apartment building. That's when it started to really sink in that something other than just some crazy rain storm had passed through here.

I was waiting for almost two hours for Anna to get home. 35 minutes of which were spent in the final mile on Queens Blvd. She finally got home and told me the amount of damage that was done. She said driving home was like driving on bed of leaves, and branches. We decided to walk around and see what else had happened.

We first hopped over the rail road tracks because we had heard that the otherside got nailed pretty hard and was powerless. The first thing we saw when we crossed were the two trees that were blocking off the road making it basically inaccessible. That and the fire leaking out of a downed powerline.

  

We started to walk down towards the park on Queens Blvd because that's where the most noticeable damage had been done. When we got to 67th Drive...

So just in case we aren't following, this would be a truck cleaved in half by a tree that spans one side of the road to the other. It's at this point you know something huge has happened. Not because you see the destruction. Nope, not that. The real reason you can tell something huge happened is life long New Yorkers are out on the street standing around, talking to everyone that walks past, and taking pictures. 

We finally made it to the park after walking down the middle of Yellowstone Blvd (which should not be possible by the way because that is one busy street). We saw some crazy things like the top of an air conditioning system planted into a fence, a couch that broke another fence, a cinder block wall toppled....

The park is utterly destroyed. That panoramic shot at the top of this post that looks like a war zone? That's the park. That's not what that park normally looks like. It had a very lush canopy, but now it's a series of twigs.

Uh....trees aren't supposed to look like that. 

It was getting late and Anna and I hadn't eaten yet, so we walked back towards our apartment and we saw probably the craziest thing we saw during this entire thing

That would be a steel garage door torn off the tracks with a gigantic hole punched in it. Yup, that's some crazy force that could do that. 

It had occurred to me that we were really really lucky. Had the wind been blowing in a different direction, that 12 foot Christmas tree would have planted itself into my kitchen. We also didn't have any power loss, and the worse that happened was our apartment got a little wet, and the lawn furniture tried to fly over the fence and onto the railroad tracks, but it didn't make it. Since it was such an emotional night, it was really hard to see the entire storm as a whole, so the next day before I took a train out to Farmingdale, I walked around to see exactly what happened.

You could start to piece together exactly the path of the heart of the macroburst took. It basically followed the path of Yellowstone down to the park, and destroyed the Northern side of Queens Blvd. Nearly every side street on the north side had a tree blocking the road. Anna discovered that when she tried to get to work the next morning and couldn't find a way to the Grand Central and had to backtrack to the L.I.E. instead. But just like an actual tornado, the macroburst was really selective in it's path of destruction. Yes, lots of trees got uprooted or snapped off at the base, but as you can see:

That garage door I showed you earlier is in a direct line to that empty swath of trees. There was also a line of four trees on Yellowstone uprooted and all laying facing the same direction in direct line with this spot in the park. Simply a ridiculous amount of power.

Most of the clean up focus has been put to the northern side of Queens Blvd because that's where all the entrances and exits to the parkways and highways are. Until today (Tuesday September 21), that tree that was blocking the entire street and crushed that truck in half was still in the road. Yellowstone still had trees down on the side of the road and some sidewalks are still inaccessible. Every morning I wake up to the sound of distant and close chainsaws lopping trees apart to try to clear the mess, but there's a lot to clean up and who knows how long it will last.

It really was a miracle that only one person was killed in this storm. With the amount of pedestrians and drivers in New York it's really a shock. The woman that died when a tree fell on her car died 10 blocks from me. She died on the off ramp Anna and I take every time we come home from her parents house.

But this city is awesome and resilient. Less than 24 hours after the storm swept through and caused all this damage, and destroyed my park...

There they were, back in the park, playing chess on a table that had been choked by branches the night before.

P.S.- Here's a different panoramic I hacked together from my actual camera the morning after the storm just so you can get a better idea.