Brooklyn Tornado

So it seems I have been through my first actual tornado.  Funny, I always thought it would happen in Texas, where they are more common, not in NYC.  That's like saying your first deadly heat wave happened in the northeast... ridiculous.

But alas, its been confirmed.  An actual tornado touched down in Park Slope, and another one in Middle Village, Queens.

In a way, I almost missed it.  I was actually babysitting in Brooklyn Heights, playing a game of scattegories with Ayden.  And as far as I knew, it wasn't even supposed to rain that day; I had no umbrella.  All of the sudden the sky got dark.  It was so fast that it actually freaked me out, and as we looked out the window, we saw the ominous clouds of an upcoming storm.  Within seconds there was thunder and lighting, but it still seemed far away, like a storm was on its way, moseying its way through the area.  But no, within a couple of minutes the rain started, fast and furious.  It was so strong that we could barely see the trees in the street corner, and the little we could see was flailing in the wind.  I closed the only open window in the living room, and Ayden went to check that her parents window wasn't open.  Yeah... if I'd known there was a tornado warning I wouldn't have sent her upstairs to check on windows, but it made the most sense at the time.  After all, I'm over 9 months pregnant, I'm not sprinting up those stairs anytime soon.

It was then I realized that despite A's maturity and precociousness, she still does need an after school sitter.  She was pretty freaked out by the storm, and I was able to be there as an adult presence.  Truth be told, the speed in which the storm started frightened me as well, but I didn't let it on, instead telling her that storms like these happen all the time, and in 20 minutes the sky would be clear again.  And that last part was true.   So we went back to our game, we had no television or Internet, and her parents would be home in an hour anyway, no reason to be concerned.

It wasn't until I got back to Park Slope that I realized how awful the storm had been.  Half the streets were blocked off because of fallen branches.  And when I say fallen branches, I mean that trees have pretty much snapped in half and the remains were littered on top of cars and the road.  I hurried home, since there was a certain "instability" in the air.  I didn't want to be the victim of a late-falling branch. 

Our block did not do very well.  Two major trees are pretty much gone, their largest branches snapped off by the storm and about 3 cars seem damaged.  Nothing major that can't be repaired, but still, its got to suck to have broken car windows from a freak tornado.  The construction going on three buildings away had problems with their scaffolding, and workers were up late into the night taking it down so it wouldn't collapse.

We walked around later in the evening to see the rest of the neighborhood, and it was an interesting mix.  By and large things were normal, with just a lot of random foliage debris on the sidewalks, but with restaurants still open.  But every couple of blocks, there would be total chaos of fallen tree limbs and broken car windows.  We walked to check on the car, which thankfully is intact and unaffected.  Though a large tree branch did fall in the same block, damaging a couple of other cars.  Thank jeebus there's no damage to our property, our insurance wouldn't have covered it anyway.  And even if they did cover it, they probably would have declared the car totaled anyway.... silly insurance companies...

There were some leaks into our apartment.  Mostly because I had accidentally left the bedroom window open and it created some type of vacuum that pushed dirt and water into the living room.   After a little bit of cleanup, the only damage was that it fried our Internet router, which we got exchanged at Time Warner.

The good news is that I didn't go into labor during any of this.  For a second I feared the excitement would make it start, but baby was smart enough to wait until traffic and hospitals have normalized.

*Because I was d*umb enough to not have my camera charged, all photos are from The Gothamist, "After Tornado Warning, Major Damage in Brooklyn"