Officials to assess whether tornado touched down in NYC storm that killed 1, disrupted trains
“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.
Fire officials were inspecting 10 buildings in Brooklyn whose roofs were peeled off or tattered by the wind.
“The wind was holding my ceiling up in the air. It was like a wave, it went up and fell back down,” said Ruby Ellis, 58, who was doing dishes in her top-floor kitchen when the storm hit. “After the roof went up, then all the rain came down and I had a flood.”
A neighbor in an adjacent building, Julian Amy, said he was sitting in his first-floor apartment when the storm barreled down his street. “I just heard a loud boom,” said the 33-year-old. “I thought it was a truck accident.”
Residents of the top floors of the buildings were evacuated. A structural engineer was called in to assess the damage.
Investigators planned to spend several hours Friday looking over the area and mapping out the width and intensity of the storm to determine if a tornado touched down, said Kyle Struckmann, a National Weather Service meteorologist.
Eight twisters have hit New York City since 1950, he said. The last was in July, when a small one hit the Bronx during a thunderstorm that left thousands without power. In 2007, a tornado with winds up to 135 mph touched down in Staten Island and in Brooklyn, where it damaged homes and ripped the roof off a car dealership.
On Thursday, a grateful Townsend Davis stood outside his Brooklyn home, where 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,” said Davis, 47. “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 in Brooklyn.
