weather

[hudebnik]

So the line of storms that caused flooding and tornadoes in the Midwest a few days ago has made its way to the east coast. It's used up a good deal of its strength on the way here, but it's still not to be trifled with. While shalmestere and I were in Pennsylvania at an SCA event, the storms hit Queens fairly hard, dropping two inches of rain in 45 minutes. As of this writing, the Long Island Expressway is closed in both directions in eastern Queens due to flooding, and that area (about a mile east of us, I guess) has flooded basements and first floors, cars that were picked up by the flood and moved down the street, exploding manhole covers, etc.

Our trip home from the SCA event was basically uneventful -- rainy, but unremarkable -- until we got to within a block of our home, when we started to see the police tape.

As shalmestere puts it, there is now a tree in our front yard that was standing on the other side of the street this morning.

These are pictures taken by flash at midnight. The little white dots are raindrops in the flash; better pictures coming in the morning.

The walk leading to our front door

The sidewalk in front of our house, with the next-door-neighbors' car engulfed in tree

A car a few doors down on the opposite side of the street, with a good chunk of another tree down on top of it

A car a few doors down on the same side of the street, with another tree down next to it

A three-story house, three doors down from ours, which has a tree where it used to have a large front yard

Comments

[ellid.livejournal.com]

Holy CRAP. Is your house all right? And the Things? Was anyone hurt?

[hudebnik.livejournal.com]

Our house and Things appear to be undamaged. Even the baby tree on our sublawn seems to have suffered a "near miss" from the much larger tree across the street, and be intact. We're a little shaken, and we haven't yet talked to the neighbors who were more directly affected than we were.

There are at least three other large trees down, and at least two other blocks of street closed, within three blocks of us. Must have been one o' them microbursts....

[shalmestere.livejournal.com]

The Things complained bitterly about not getting dinner until midnight, but they seem otherwise unscathed. (Thing Two paces a bit during thunderstorms, but neither one of them is really storm-phobic; still, when I saw the downed trees I was afraid that we would come home to Thing-generated mayhem, and was relieved to find house and Things as we had left them....)