Tornado Transforms Quiet Glen Cove Into Virtual War Zone, Residents Say

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The New York Sun

Hundreds of Long Island households were without power last night after a tornado transformed the quiet suburb of Glen Cove into what residents described as a virtual war zone.


One Glen Cove resident, Mariangie Godoy, said that when the storm struck late Friday, she thought she was witnessing a terrorist attack. “I thought that they were bombing us,” Ms. Godoy, 39, told The New York Sun. “I thought it was the end of the world.”


Ms. Godoy said she left her work at a local dry-cleaning shop shortly after 9 p.m. Friday, but she could not reach her home because fallen trees blocked roadways. She parked her car outside a Blockbuster video rental store and – with her husband and 17-year-old stepson – ran several blocks, past live wires strewn across sidewalks and lawns, until she safely reached her house.


“I can imagine the people on 9/11, what they suffered, what they went through, what they felt like,” Ms. Godoy said. “I was running for my life.”


She arrived home to find her husband’s family – including his 56-year-old mother – shaken, but unharmed. Moments later, she said, a tree crashed into another home on her block, slicing the house down the middle. She said that she heard several voices inside the smashed house crying, “Help me, help me!”


A National Weather Service meteorologist, Michael Wyllie, classified the storm as an F1 tornado, with winds of 73 to 112 miles per hour.


According a spokeswoman for the Long Island Power Authority, Christine Restani, 3,500 customers lost electricity during the storm. She said yesterday afternoon that she expected that power would be restored to all customers some time in the evening. But according to an update posted on the utility’s Web site at 7 p.m. last night, 425 Glen Cove customers still lacked electricity.


Despite the outages, Ms. Restani said that LIPA – which serves more than 1.1 million customers in Nassau and Suffolk counties as well as the Rockaway Peninsula of Queens – recorded a new weekend high for electricity delivered at 3 p.m. Saturday afternoon.


The utility delivered 5,141 megawatts of electricity, Ms. Restani said, shattering the previous high of 4,426 megawatts, set on July 5, 2003.


But she said that the surge in demand for electricity Saturday did not precipitate blackout concerns. Even when the utility’s output reached its peak Saturday afternoon, LIPA still had more than 1,000 megawatts of surplus capacity, she said. A Glen Cove police officer said that there were no reported injuries from the tornado.


The New York Sun

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