Tornado in Queens? Looking like a Jungle out there.

As of right now, I think the National Weather Service is still trying to determine whether or not the freak storm we received last night in Queens & Brooklyn was indeed a tornado. Tornado or not, it did do severe damage throughout Queens. It definitely did hit us hard in Flushing, and to my cousin in Maspeth. The storm hit us in Queens last night around 5:40PM or so (I got out of work at 5PM, and luckily got back home by 5:30PM) and ended by 6PM-- so it was extremely quick-- but the damages were extensive.

Right across the street from my house looks like:

It took down a ton of telephone and cable wires down with it. My entire neighborhood is out of cable, so for those of us (like me!) who have a cable modem, we don't have internet access either. No idea when it'll be repaired and restored; when I called Time Warner this morning, all I got was a generic recording stating that they are aware that there is an outage in our area, that they're working on it, and that at this time there's no estimate for when service will be restored. Thank goodness for internet access at work?  

I had a class last night at 6:40PM, and I had actually attempted to go. So after, like, 10 minutes past the storm, I took my bike and headed out.

Right down the block was:

The fallen tree completely blocked the road getting in/out of my block, so our street was pretty empty. The car it landed on will be needing quite a bit of roof repair, plus a windshield replacement, for sure.
On my walk to work today, I noticed another tree that fell into a house, on the opposite end of the street.

Within 10 minutes of biking, I knew that there was no way that class was still going on though. Firemen and policemen were all over the place on practically every block. Traffic was a mess, and everyone was confused because the winds blew the traffic lights sideways and no one knew which light corresponded with them:

Had to try to not get run over by a lot of confused, angry motorists-- this street was particularly hard to cross, and I had to dismount and walk my bike across.

A tree blocked off entire expressway route: 

More destruction around the neighborhood:

Lots of broken concrete everywhere.

When I got on to school, campus security was herding everyone out, saying that the campus had closed. There was an exodus of students (who, I guess, had their classes canceled during the middle of their lessons?), which resulted in a lot of teary/shocked students discovering of their ruined vehicles:
 

Luckily, we didn't suffer any damage to our property-- the house and car are fine. We were luckier than most. Out in Maspeth, Sean's car has a few dents from a tree falling on it (not the tree TRUNK, luckily), and Kat's house has a tree leaning against the front (windows)-- haven't seen it myself, but the pictures should be interesting. She reported having to spend quite a few hours last night working and sawing tree branches and clearing them away, and that the job's still not completely finished, a day later.

 Apparently, the way the tree is positioned, they really can't clear it without potentially doing damage to the house. She emailed this morning, saying: "My dad has been sitting outside looking at the tree right up against our window for like 3 hrs just trying to figure out the puzzle of how to get it down without breaking any windows..."

Hopefully things will be cleaned up/repaired soon for everybody. Internet, tv, phones and electricity for all!