New York Tornado of 2018!

It was towards the end of the business day (for me, at least) when the alarms rang throughout the office. It was not the fire alarm. Rather, it was the collective ringing and buzzing of iPhones and Androids alike alerting users of an emergency. I pulled out my phone and read the message – “Tornado Warning!”

The message didn’t bother me much for a few reasons:

1.) The area where my wife was located was already seeing the effects of the approaching storm. She was with my daughter on her way home from picking her up from school when she called to warn me about the storm. Word of the tornado was spreading like wildfire on the radio. I brushed it off. This isn’t the first time we’ve gotten such warnings, usually a tornado “watch.” I heard my daughter shouting in the background, as she urgently shouted through the Bluetooth mic for me to hear her, “Daddy, daddy! It’s windy!” My wife was nearly home, so I was thankful for that. She told me to be careful, and I told her not to worry, just get home safe.

2.) A few minutes after that phone call from my wife, my mom called. Again, she warned me about the tornado. I looked out the window from my office and saw nothing to be concerned about. Sure, it was overcast but nothing out of the ordinary. Again, I was told to be careful and not to go anywhere until it passes. I told my mom not to worry.
That’s when smartphones ignited in unison.

It was a melody of chaos and impending doom. Outside, the sky went dark, rain pelted against the building and windows, trees bent and stretched, its branches being forced against their will. People in my office curiously walked towards the windows to get a better look. I stayed behind a few cubicles just in case. My view of what was happening was fine from where I was. A supervisor came running down the aisle as she shouted for everyone to “get away from the windows!” If it weren’t for the madness that ensued outside the scene would have been slightly comical.

I immediately grabbed my phone and walked away from the cluster of people that were now gathered near the center of the office and called my wife. There was no answer. Now, I was starting to get worried. I called again and, again. Still, still no answer. Finally, on the third try, she answered. I asked how she was doing. She confided in me that she and my daughter were both scared. My daughter’s heart was pounding rapidly against her chest, the tell-tale sign of being terrified.

I told her to get down to the basement and she abided my instruction. I told her that things are a little hectic at work and that everything I saw from the fourth floor was almost surreal and completely unexpected. I thanked God that I didn’t leave for as the storm hit at around 4:20 pm and I am usually out the door at 4:30 pm. A few minutes later and the storm would have caught me as I crossed the bridge on my way home.

“The playground and the pergola fell,” my wife told me. My daughter’s playground in our backyard was knocked over by the wind as did our pergola. I was dumbfounded. The pergola I could understand as it is relatively light, but the playground? I had to get home to be with my family, but as I looked out the window, there was no way I was getting out of there at that moment.

I waited a few more minutes when there was a calm to the storm and a co-worker and I made our way down the stairs. The stairwell was full of people, slowly making their way down, unsure if it was safe to proceed. I rummaged through the crowd and made my way into the lobby where there were even more people, waiting in eager anticipation to get home. As we made our way to the exit, the rain was still coming down, and I overheard someone say that it was going to pick up again. Screw it! I’m not going to sit and wait for hours until the rain stops completely. And so, I pushed the glass doors open, covered my head with the company laptop bag and made a dash out the front door towards the parking lot where my car awaited. I wished my co-worker a safe ride home, and with that, I left him in the dust.

The parking lot was full of water, flooded. There were branches strewn about everywhere. I got into my car and prepared myself for a long ride home. What is normally a 15/20 minute drive home turned into an hour. Trees were down everywhere; police cruisers sped through the crowded highway to get to their designated areas to set up flares where trees blocked some of the highways. I was thankful that it wasn’t so bad by the time I got to the bridge and that there were no trees blocking my passageway home.

When I got home, there was still a light rain coming down. I looked out back and saw the pergola and the playground down for the count. I had my hand on the handle to the sliding back door as I was going to go outside and see if there is anything I can do to clean up some of the mess when the sky was torn apart in different directions by what seemed like a rogue bolt of lightning making its escape from the heavens. Nope! I released my grip from the handle and looked to the gray sky. Tomorrow.

The next day, news reports were somber. Reports of an eleven-year-old girl in the nearby town killed as she sat in her mother’s car and crushed by a fallen tree. Again, surreal. We’re a little used to Nor’Easters and blizzards in the North East but tornadoes? No, this was a rarity. I know that to folks in tornado alley may scoff at this much how we scoff at Floridians when panic strikes when a single snowflake falls. Still, it was pretty freaky, and memories of Hurricane Andrew came flooding back. Yes, I was there for that, and we survived.

I felt helpless being apart from my family and I would have been absolutely destroyed if anything happened to them. Even the mere thought of something happening brings shivers down to the very core within. But, alas, we were fortunate that nothing happened to us. We can breathe a sigh of relief, and we lived to talk about the “New York Tornado of 2018” – I don’t know if it’s being dubbed that but, there, I just coined the term. (copyright @Reelybored)