New York City, like many older East Coast cities, has a very impressive urban forest. It's made up of the many parks, street trees and yard trees that can be found throughout the City, even in Manhattan. Many of these trees are nearly a century old, some even older. They give many neighborhoods of the City a wonderful character. They can shade neighborhoods, significantly reducing the temperature at street level on hot days. They filter the air New Yorkers breathe. They keep us connected to the natural world even in the heart of one of the world's major urban areas.
And they just took a massive hit.
At around 5:30 PM a major storm front passed through the New York City region. Wind speeds were measured up to 100 MPH. Visibility was reduced to zero for the early portion of the storm. There are claims that a tornado touched down in Brooklyn, but no confirmation.
Sadly there has been one person killed on the Grand Central Parkway by a falling tree. My heart goes out to her friends and family. We're fortunate that there have been so few deaths and injuries, though, considering the wide extent of damage to the City's forest.
(Edited for a bit more empathy and clarity.)
Here is video of the storm passing through Brooklyn. At the end of the video the cameraman says "un oh" and shuts off the camera. He's probably scrambling like mad to get off the roof where he was filming since the winds pushing that wall of water were incredibly intense.
I took a drive through my neighborhood just south and east of downtown Flushing in Queens. There are many tree lined streets here and a handful of parks including Kissena Park, a real gem. There are literally hundreds of trees down in a very small area of one borough of New York.
In the area between Northern Boulevard and Booth Memorial Avenues in the 140th through 160th Avenues I counted over seventy downed trees. I stopped counting about halfway through my drive, so I know there were many, many more. Many streets are blocked off right now with downed trees completely crossing the roadways. Streets where only one lane is blocked have been left open. About half of the area is without power due to downed power lines. Much of that area must be without telephone and cable as there are many more downed lines besides power. The street trees that came down managed to take out many parked cars. I counted about 20 on my drive.
The street and path lights in and around Kissena Park were out, so I couldn't tell how bad the damage was there, but there were quite a few trees down around the perimeter. I could see a few down in the park from the headlights of cars driving past. We'll have to wait until tomorrow to see just how bad things are there.
Happily I didn't see any houses that were damaged by downed trees, but I'm sure there must be some. Perhaps I just didn't see them without street lights to illuminate the damage.
Many of the trees that came down were larger, older ones. Perhaps they had hollow trunks that weakened them or were diseased or stressed. But there were many smaller younger trees that came down as well. I saw few trees that were uprooted. Most had sheared off from the trunks at junctions or just at 5 to 10 feet off the ground.
This is the worst weather damage that I've seen in the 10 years I've lived in the City. My father-in-law says it's the worst he's seen in his more than 40 years of residence here.
This is at least the third storm that we've had this year that has caused large amounts of tree damage, and by far the worst if my neighborhood is any indication. I worry about the cumulative effect of storms like these. The urban forest can take one hard hit and come back, but I'm not sure it can take repeated blows and still survive.
I know that you can't link an individual weather event to climate change, but I really think the trends we're seeing, the increase in extreme weather events, is caused by climate change. I fear for our forests if this is the new world they will have to adapt to.