Of all the crazy things I thought I'd never see, this one was too far-fetched to even make the list. An F2 tornado struck Bay Ridge, Brooklyn (and only Bay Ridge) yesterday morning - just in time for the morning commute. Needless to say that my commute never happened because the subways were under water and there were no U-boats available, but I enjoyed a day off courtesy of Mother Nature. I took a bike ride in the afternoon to survey the damage and it was pretty amazing. Sadly, we lost a lot of great old trees, but at least nobody was hurt. Amazing huh? here is the newspaper clipping:
NEW YORK: It took experts a while to confirm what many in southwestern Brooklyn knew had descended on their neighborhoods as a new workday dawned. It was a tornado - the first to hit the New York borough since modern record-keeping began - and it turned whole sections of Brooklyn upside down.
Roofs were torn off houses. More than 30 families were forced from their homes. Tall trees as thick as men were yanked out by the roots.
No one was seriously injured, but cars were turned sideways, awnings and aluminum siding shredded, and countless windows and windshields shattered, in a destructive rain of bricks and branches and water Wednesday.
Lanie Mastellone was drinking her coffee about 7 a.m. in her apartment on the top floor of her two-story house when she sensed that her windows were going to blow in. She went toward the front of the house, and as she passed from one room to another the ceilings collapsed.
"I passed my living room, I passed my dining room, I go to the bedroom," Mastellone said. "They were going one at a time. It was coming from the back forward."
Mastellone, a widow who lives alone, was more puzzled than terrified. "It was almost unemotional," she said. "I was still thinking, 'Maybe my roof is leaking?' I think denial is a wonderful thing sometimes."
Still, she knew she had to get out. "I grabbed my wedding ring and my cellphone," she said. She opened her apartment door, stepped out into the hallway and looked up. "That's when I realized I had no roof," she said.
She was not the only one. Two houses away, the roof looked as if it had exploded. Most of it was lying in the street.
Meanwhile, three inches, or 7.5 centimeters, of rain in three hours brought the New York transit system to its knees, The Associated Press reported. Subway tracks were swamped, buses jammed and commuter trains held up for hours because of flooding Wednesday. Much of the mess had been mopped up by early Thursday, but the region faced the possibility of more storms within a day.
The U.S. National Weather Service declared the storm in Brooklyn a Category 2 tornado on the Enhanced Fujita scale, with winds up to 135 miles per hour, or 215 kilometers per hour. It was the first tornado recorded in Brooklyn since record-keeping began in 1950, said Jeffrey Warner, a meteorologist at Pennsylvania State University.
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