Greenwood Lake is an affluent area. Very pricey damages. Glad nobody lost their life.

This was the strangest storm, unlike anything I've ever experienced in my 20+ years in Greenwood Lake. The storm seemed to come out of nowhere and at a time when you normally wouldn't expect a storm, around 730 am on Thursday 23rd. When I went outside with my cup of tea at about 7 am, skies were calm and there was no detectable wind. Then, around 730 am with no warning, straight-line winds and punishing sideways rain. Most of the wind damage occurred within a matter of minutes. This was the first time in my life that I felt the need to move away from the windows and scramble into the basement, afraid that the windows might shatter or the roof might come off. In my neighborhood ("Lakelands"), the sideways rain continued for another 20 minutes before turning to vertical cats-and-dogs rain for another hour. (This extreme, cats & dogs type rain which used to happen here about once every 2 or 3 years is now happening with increasing frequency; already twice this spring and now a third time with this Thursday's storm.) Based on what I saw driving to Hewitt, NJ and back a few days ago after the shore roads reopened, the most serious damage occurred about 5 or 6 km south of the Village center, near the NY-NJ border on both the eastern and western shores. Even where I live, quite far from the epicenter, the storm (a) lifted a 6-foot fiberglass ladder that was leaning up against my house and dropped it at the neighbor's property line about 8 feet uphill, (b) twisted a healthy, 30-foot tall hemlock tree at the edge of the forest, snapping it in 66/33 sections, and deposited the upper 66% about 10 feet into the forest, and (c) most surprising to me of all, snapped several 30-foot high phyllostachys bamboos at random locations, none of which have ever naturally broken in the 16 years they've been on my property, even in severe winter storms when the tops were forced down to the ground in heavy, wet snowfall. (YES I am aware that phyllostachys is now prohibited in NY State and I am in the process of eradicating them.) Thankfully my neighborhood was spared the worst of the storm and only had a few large trees fall onto power lines. We lost power for a few hours while folks a little further south lost power for several days.

That’s so crazy to see this because I’m in central Queens and we didn’t have so much as a breeze during the storm. Couple flashes of lightning, and very heavy rain that fell straight down.