A mighty wind.

So, I keep trying to write about tornados.


See, a week ago Wednesday to be precise, I managed to once again come very close to some awful weather malady.

Last year, I wound up criss-crossing the path an F2 tornado took no less than three times about 15 or 20 minutes before it struck.

No sh*t!

It was another one of those times when I was blissfully ignorant of something until after the fact.


That day I was driving down the Saw Mill River Parkway getting off to go down to Tarrytown to pick up the mail on my way into the city. The red line on the image is the path the tornado took, I was going down the purple road and then across the green road where it has the callout about tree damage.

On July 12, 2006 a strong south westerly wind on the surface acted in conjunction with a strong upper level jet to cause conditions to become ripe. The tornado spawned as a waterspout over the Hudson River in the southwest quadrant of the storm and traveled in the northeast direction, something that is distinctive with most tornado causing thunderstorms. Once it reached the Westchester side of the river it became a Tornado and roared up Beekman Ave., the Main Street of Sleepy Hollow. The tornado reached F-2 status as it crossed over the Sleepy Hollow village line into Hawthorne. From there it tore across Hawthorne, New York, destroying a California Closets office and warehouse. It then proceeded up Stevens Ave. and crossed into Valhalla, New York inflicting much damage. It finally crossed the Kensico Reservoir and caused slight damage in Greenwich, CT before going out to the Long Island Sound.

It was just one of those days where you miss something by a few minutes. I was actually in Tarrytown getting the mail when the thing was going up the main street in Sleepy Hollow and it started to rain. Then, I was going to go back around the lakes and pick up the Saw Mill again but decided to go down and take Benedict Avenue over.

WHITE PLAINS, July 12 — A reported tornado touched down in central Westchester County on Wednesday, heavily damaging a commercial building on Route 9A, knocking down trees and physically lifting a state trooper’s car and twirling it around.

The twister, first spotted crossing the Hudson River and described as looking like a waterspout, touched down at least twice, according to reports made to the National Weather Service. It moved over the village of Sleepy Hollow, then into the town of Mount Pleasant, where it did the most damage in the hamlet of Hawthorne. It was in Hawthorne that the state trooper, who was driving on Route 9A, encountered the storm.

So, that was a bit of a close call and even going home that night I somehow was lucky enough to avoid all the traffic tie ups resulting from the storm (again not intentionally).

This past week, I was supposed to go into the city on Wednesday. It was another one of those hot days, we actually set a record for the temperature up here with 85° but, I didn’t really pay much attention because I was getting a lot of things crossed off my list and it was a fairly productive day.

Sure, they predicted thunderstorms late in the day but, because I was getting a lot of things crossed off the ol’ list it didn’t register with me. My only thought about the weather was whether or not I would want to take the train into the city and just avoid the hassle of driving through thunderstorms and the accompanying road mess either on the way in or on the way home.

As the day got later, it became obvious I just wouldn’t have the extra time to take the train in and I still had to pick up the laundry. So, I went down and got the laundry and just bagged it and threw it in the trunk figuring to fold it later on in the evening. I started making my way in and at the time I noticed how the sky to the west was getting really, really dark. As a matter of fact, the sky was a deep purple, although you couldn’t see any clouds you could tell there was bad weather on its way.

Oblivious to this, I started my drive into the city making my way through another, very suburban looking part of the village. It’s part of the village where the lawns are always well manicured, and the streets rarely have much traffic on them but, it also serves as a bit of a back way down to another main road which would put me onto the first part of my journey cityward.

Aside from the sky to the west it’s a pretty normal day, there’s a woman standing alongside the curb no doubt waiting for the school bus to pass by and drop off her kid, I pass a pair of kids riding bicycles giving them a wide berth but, as I am driving through the neighborhood, I notice something which in the briefest passing moment strikes me as a bit odd.

I am looking at a tree, all spread out with it’s leaves and silhouetted against the darkening sky to the west and there... is... just... something... about the light on the leaves which seems a little bit off.

Now, I’ve been in situations out in the Midwest where I’ve seen bad weather and anyone who has been through that kind of weather will tell you there is a weird quality to the light. It’s a hard thing to explain to someone until they’ve seen it for themselves but, things take on a strange quality in that light. Thinking back now, the thing that stands out is how the leaves were so amazingly still with not even the slightest hint of a breeze blowing through them. Even so, they were framed by this terribly threatening sky so it seemed odd they wouldn’t be moving a little.

And I drove another few blocks and I got to a part of the village where there is a campus for a fairly well known corporation and a few houses were constructed on the grounds of the campus with everything behind a six-foot red brick wall. The road I was about to turn onto traces the edge of the wall.

I look across the street at a driveway into the walled in complex and there is some kind of septic truck and I notice what appears to be for lack of a better phrase, ‘a dust devil.’ There just seems to be this crazy, frenetic jumble of debris flying about. Dust, leaves, all the loose stuff lying around, moving about with great violence. It’s not a funnel or anything but, things are just twisting and twirling about in a really active way, a way that makes the heart beat a little faster as hardwired and instinctual alarms are ringing somewhere in the back where the reptilian brain is.

Rain starts to come down in thick and sporadic drops.

Plop... plop... plop... plop...

They make a noise hitting the car, a heavy almost meaty quality to the force of the droplets.



I make a left turn, go down a small rise, turning a corner (all the while with the wall to my right) and as get around the corner I come upon a scene that is like an explosion has just gone off. Thick branches are lying about the road, a power pole sits awkwardly over the roadway at an impossible 30° angle and power wires are twisted across the road surface. The sky opens up and it is suddenly like someone turned over a bucket of water dumping the contents all about me. Rain is coming down with such an intensity the cars’ wipers can barely keep the windshield clear and it is hard to even see more than a few feet ahead.

I make a u-turn and find I cannot even retrace my path, branches are down all over and the short five or ten minute ride back to my part of the village becomes a odyssey of picking around downed trees and branches. At some point I know I drive over something big but not having much choice even though I can hear it painfully striking the bottom of the car.

It was that fast.

It wasn’t a tornado though, it was rather something else called a downburst:

A downburst is a column of sinking air that is capable of producing damaging straight-line winds of over 150 mph (240 km/h), often producing damage similar to, but distinguishable from tornadoes. This is because the physical properties of a downburst are completely opposite that of a tornado. Downburst damage will radiate from a central point as the descending column spreads out when impacting the surface, whereas tornado damage tends towards convergent damage consistent with rotating winds.

It’s one of those heart-palpitating events you are happy to survive and it’s the second time in as many years I’ve skirted the edge of some nasty, nasty weather.

No, it wasn’t a tornado, but residents of northern Westchester don’t feel much better now as they cut their way through the trees that came crashing down on their neighborhoods.

Briarcliff Manor’s deputy fire chief suffered a fatal heart attack while helping a neighbor with a downed wire, the only known casualty from Wednesday’s thunderstorms. There were problems that approached being a disaster: Schoolchildren had to scurry for shelter when falling trees and wires trapped their bus in New Castle, and a Katonah mother and her three children somehow avoided injury when two giant oaks collapsed into the living room where they were gathered.

In the storm’s aftermath, residents are left with one big mess, a few thousand residual power outages, and a lot of newfound home repairs. And, yes, more rain is coming. Forecasters were predicting up to 3 more inches of rain for the Lower Hudson Valley, starting before dawn today and lasting, on and off, into the weekend.