The Justin Avenue Tornado

So it looks like the city of New Orleans made it through and folks living in more rural areas were not as hard-hit as was feared. It's not really a cause for celebration; rather it is a cause for relief and for hope that those who were hard hit (especially the families of the 8 people who died) are getting all the help they need.

I think we're somewhat spoiled here in the Northeast. We don't often suffer natural disasters of a grand scale here outside of major snowstorms and even those cause more inconvenience than actual loss of property or worse, life. Unless you've experienced that vertiginous sense of being completely at the mercy of nature you lack any idea of how frightening even a "minor" storm can be. While my experience in the Nor'Easter that hit LBI back in May was nerve-wracking, it didn't compare to the pure terror that I remember from living through a tornado that dropped out of Hurricane David when I was 12 years old.

Yeah, a tornado. On Staten Island.

The thing that bugs me is I can't find any documentation of it now. The pictures we had to take for the insurance company are probably boxed away in someone's basement (oh the days before digital cameras....). However the memories are still vivid.

David was a category 5 killer in the Caribbean and had weakened considerably by the time he hit NYC. He still packed enough of a punch to do some damage though.

I don't remember what time it was, but sometime in the middle of the night that the storm hit my mom woke me up and forced me to come down to the living room and sleep on the floor completely covered by a blanket because she was worried about the hurricane blowing out the upstairs windows or even taking away the top of the house. They say in a wind like that you head to the basement but we had an unfinished basement sitting atop a high water table so in a heavy rain you got ankle-deep (or more) water so that wasn't an option. We cowered on the floor under blankets as the wind howled, the transformer on the utility pole outside the house exploded in a shower of sparks worthy of the finest professional fireworks display and power lines writhed in the sheeting, screaming rain like eels trying to escape a fishing net. The smell of ozone was everywhere and God-knows what rattled past the windows and across the roof. It was terrifying and yet at the same time oddly beautiful; a sensory overload that enveloped your mind.

The next day we ventured out to survey the damage (after Con Ed had arrived to cut the power and fix the lines so we weren't electrocuted of course). A whole lot of bricks had blown off the chimney and we lost a bunch of shingles. Boards on the eaves were hanging off the back of the house. A neighbor's aluminum shed was a twisted mess in our backyard having been deposited there by the small twister. You could see the path of the thing; it was only maybe 40 feet wide through our backyard and the backyards of the houses on the next block. The most impressive thing I saw was someone's entire above ground swimming pool still full of water had been shoved about 6 or 7 feet through their back fence and into their neighbor's yard. It occurred to me that it was a good thing that the mini-twister had gone through the back yard since if it had hit in the front of the house the poles that held the sputtering power lines and burning transformer might have been blown onto our house either crushing or electrocuting us.

Miraculously, none of the trees on our property came down. Some big branches were ripped off and strewn about but that was it.

A little later in the morning a few news vans showed up to interview us locals; one of the surprising things to my young ears was hearing a reporter exclaim "holy shit!" when she looked at the damage from the utility pole fire. When you're 12 and living in a world without cable TV you just assume nobody on TV really swears. I was one of the neighborhood kids standing in the background as the crews collected their obligatory sound bites. I was on the fringe of the crowd so only half of me appeared on screen that night but it was still sort of exciting. We had made it through the storm and I had gotten on TV as a bonus. What could be better to a 12 year old, right?

Today the house that I grew up in is gone, the trees on the property are gone, my parents are gone and most of the neighbors we had back then are gone. I can't find any record that proves what happened on our block was officially a tornado. I suppose in the greater scheme of things it doesn't matter. In today's world it is a rare thing that exists only in a person's memory. Regardless of the historical record or lack of one, it remains a real experience to me. What else does a person really have?