Authorities probe whether storm that blazed 14-mile path through NYC was tornado

NYC storm leaves 14-mile path of destruction

NEW YORK — A brief but vicious storm that churned through New York City left a 14-mile path of destruction from Brooklyn to Queens, toppling trees, peeling away roofs and killing a woman in a car who had just swapped seats with her husband.

The National Weather Service sought Friday to determine whether the fury of wind and rain that hit the previous evening was a tornado. City officials said the storm hopped across New York Harbor from Staten Island and barreled uninterrupted from Park Slope in Brooklyn all the way to the Bayside neighborhood in Queens.

Gov. David Paterson said he had asked the Federal Emergency Management Agency to help assess the damage to help determine whether federal disaster funds can be requested.

“The severity of the storm may have caught us by surprise, but New Yorkers are a resilient people and we will get through this ordeal together,” he said in a statement.

The storm was part of a line that rippled across much of the Northeast before completing its run in New York City during the Thursday evening rush hour in a matter of minutes. It caught nearly everyone off guard, including commuters heading home and parents picking up children from after-school activities.

Parks Commissioner Adrian Benepe estimated the storm destroyed more than 1,000 trees, snapping them and scattering them like bowling pins. He said forestry experts were finding damage patterns consistent with twisting winds, rather than more typical sideways winds.

“This is a very brief storm that was extremely destructive,” he said.

The storm also downed power lines and crushed vehicles, including a car in Queens where Aline Levakis and her husband, Billy Levakis, were parked. The couple, from Pennsylvania, had just switched seats in the car, said a former business partner, Peter Markos.

She was killed; he survived.

“There are lots of stories of people who came very close to being hit by a big tree and killed, but fortunately there was only one,” Mayor Michael Bloomberg said Friday. “And that one was really tragic.”

Investigators on Friday were mapping out the width and intensity of the storm to determine whether a tornado touched down, said Kyle Struckmann, a National Weather Service meteorologist. The probe included surveying the aftermath by helicopter.

Stunned residents sifted through the debris Friday, and utility crews worked to restore power in blacked-out neighborhoods. The number of customers without power peaked at 37,000, but that gradually improved Friday. About 29,000 customers, mostly in Queens, had no power midday Friday.

On a badly hit Brooklyn block of 1890s brownstones in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood, the storm swept away parts of rooftops on at least six homes.

One four-story rowhouse was so waterlogged that walls were marked Friday with large black Xs — meaning they were to be torn down. In the yard behind, debris lay piled up, including parts of the roof, a crushed gazebo and a whole tree that landed there from two houses away.

“Just look at this,” said owner Babe Hatcher, standing in the backyard.

Pointing at the top floor, he said: “No one can sleep up there; there’s no ceiling. You can see the sky.”

Department of Buildings Commissioner Robert Limandri said the city had received more than 60 reports of buildings with possible structural damage. Officials had ordered residents out of some of the worst-hit homes in Brooklyn.

The city parks department said it was still assessing the tree damage and cautioned that cleanup would likely go on for days. The parks commissioner warned pedestrians to be careful walking under trees that might have broken branches.

All over the city, witnesses compared stories of what they had seen — street signs uprooted, storefront windows blown out, thick tree trunks snapped in half, a parked van lifted a foot into the air.

“A huge tree limb, like 25 feet long, flew right up the street, up the hill and stopped in the middle of the air 50 feet up in this intersection and started spinning,” said Steve Carlisle, 54. “It was like a poltergeist.”

“Then all the garbage cans went up in the air and this spinning tree hits one of them like it was a bat on a ball. The can was launched way, way over there,” he said, pointing at a building about 120 feet away where a metal garbage can lay flattened.

Ruby Ellis was doing dishes when the storm wailed over her house and yanked on the roof.

“The wind was holding my ceiling up in the air. It was like a wave; it went up and fell back down,” Ellis said. “After the roof went up, then all the rain came down and I had a flood.”

The line of storms began its work to the west. At least seven tornadoes were confirmed in Ohio, where storms flipped mobile homes, injured several people and damaged part of an Ohio State University campus. A small tornado also touched down in southern New Jersey, knocking over trees and damaging two houses.

Eight twisters have hit New York City since 1950, the National Weather Service said. The last was in July, a small one that whirled through the Bronx during a thunderstorm that left thousands without power. In 2007, a tornado with winds as high as 135 mph touched down in Staten Island and Brooklyn, where it damaged homes and sucked the roof off a car dealership.

Associated Press Writers Cristian Salazar, Beth J. Harpaz, Ula Ilnytzky, David B. Caruso and Charles Sheehan contributed to this report.