Remember the saying from that old commercial? Don't mess with Mother Nature, or something like that. A weekend like this reminds us all how powerful a force nature can be. And this is small scale compared to what we see on the national news -- but even a small disaster is huge when it happens in your front yard. 4 days of high winds and rain, that's what they predicted -- and they were right.
We took a quick ride around town yesterday afternoon and all seemed to be under control. In fact, we only took 2 pictures! Below left is a huge puddle at the intersection of 90th Street and 86th Road. This corner would later be featured on the Channel 11 News at 10 -- but not for any reason that's obvious in this picture. And below right is the intersection of Woodhaven and Jamaica where the winds blew one of the newspaper containers over. Pretty pedestrian stuff -- but that was about to change. And wait until you see how You Tube and Twitter were used to make news in Woodhaven!
We got a call from friends around the corner on 90th Street about a power line that went up in flames across the street from their house. They posted the video to YouTube -- and we posted the video to Facebook. Here's the dramatic video --
Scary, no? So we got our rain gear on and headed out the door to take some pictures. In the meantime, we also posted the video to Twitter, where we ended up communicating with Peter Thorne, weekend anchor at WPIX-11 (click here for Peter's Twitter Page - a great follow!) Next thing you know, we're on the phone with their producers -- we put them in touch with our friends who took the video -- and before you know it, Rich Fogal is being interviewed on the air. Pretty cool, eh? Here's some of the video we took last night, the downed tree on 90th Street, a downed tree on 86th Street, and the WPIX Coverage.
Here are some photos of the carnage -- with the rain and the lack of lighting, some of the pics are a little tough to see what's going on. Below is the downed tree on 90th Street that caused the fire. Look at the left of that photo and you'll see the wires that were dragged down. If you scroll all the way back to the top of the page, you'll see the picture we took of the puddle at the intersection of 90th Street and 86th Road. Here's a closeup of that picture. The green arrow is pointing out the tree that would fall a few hours later. And the red arrow is pointing to the area of powerline near where the fire happened. Moving along we came across this scene on 86th Street, between 85th Road and Park Lane South. A came down, blocking the street and crushing some cars in the process. There was also some sparking of wires. This tree looks like it was ripped out from the roots. Look at the size of that! We ventured just a little closer for a peek. Ouch! That ripped up the sidewalk, totaled a car -- we later found out that no one was hurt. But this could have easily killed lots of folks. Oh boy -- the same tree got a car across the street. And the branches appeared to have a whole house covered. This is bad news. If you watched the video you saw the power lines starting to pop and crackle, so we got the heck out of there. We stopped off at Dunkin' Donuts for some coffee and a Hot Chocolate. And look -- most of the rest of the newspaper containers blew over into the puddle. 
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