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

[hudebnik.livejournal.com]

Our front door faces one street (which had 2-1/2 trees down), and our garage faces a different one (which had only small branches down), so we decided it was the better part of valor to go around the block and park in the garage. We don't park in the garage very often, because the telephone pole in front of it requires some tricky maneuvering to get a car in or out.