Another Boulevard of Broken Trees

 Our country is experiencing bad weather in so many states.  

Wednesday night it was our turn in the area where I live in New York State. Trees down, people without power - at one point, over 10,000 without power.  Yesterday, the local utility (NYSEG) started to distribute dry ice to residents.  Today, we saw utility repair type trucks from a couple of out of town companies.  I just checked NYSEG's website and it appears all but a few households have had their power restored.  Thankfully, our hot weather had paused for the occasion.

I know one person who lost her garage when a tree came down.  Their gas grill was blown across the street.  She was positive it was a small tornado, but it appears to have been "only" a microburst.

I didn't want to take pictures in my immediate neighborhood (at least two neighbors lost parts of trees and there were branches down everywhere) or in a residential area, so we headed to the Vestal Rail Trail. These pictures were taken July 9, after crews had a chance to clear the path.

The interesting thing about this first downed tree (see upper center) is the red color of the splintered wood (noting that most of the foliage belongs to a sumac, not the tree that came down, and the red in the lower left are the sumac's red berry clusters.)  In a search, I come up with dawn redwoods, but do they grow in my part of New York State?  If anyone has a guess, I'd love to know in the comments.

A broken tree along the Boulevard of Broken Trees.

A (I'm guessing) male sumac down here.

 Parts of trees.

At another park, I saw several small branches driven into the ground.   Here is one (upper left).  It doesn't look impressive but I think it's more evidence of the microburst, given there were several of these, just not close enough to photograph together.

I missed the weather excitement in New York City from the recent tropical storm, but I wrote about a different downstate weather event on March 13, 2010.  Here is my original "Boulevard of Broken Trees" post.  If I had only known then how the weather would turn even more deadly.

The Boulevard of Broken Trees - March 13, 2010

 We are 40 miles north of NYC today, and experiencing a nor'easter.  The house where we are staying has lost power twice already.  There are downed trees everywhere, both from last month's snowstorm and today's windstorm.  On the Taconic Parkway there are a lot of old historic stone fences - a lot of them have damage from last month's storm.

After the power went off this morning, we went to McDonald's that had power for breakfast.  Just as we were finishing up there, the power went off.  Everyone laughed-obviously it isn't a rare occurrence down here.

Where we live, we escaped last month's snowstorm but down here, the tree services will have job security for a long time.  I have not seen anything quite like it in many many years.

Today we are having lots of wind and rain.  We had to drive to a party in Yonkers and on the way home there was a traffic tieup on the Sprain Brook Parkway due to a tree that had come down, blocking the leftmost of 3 northbound lanes.  Fortunately it appeared no one was hurt-but in the past people have been killed on this parkway from falling trees.

We saw signs that the nearby Sawmill Parkway entrances were closed due to flooding, and I don't think it will be long before the Bronx River Parkway and the Sprain Brook are closed down, too.

I hope the power stays on tonight and we don't have any trees that fall down here.

We sometimes call Binghamton "Borington"...and on days like this, we can be grateful for Borington's boring weather.

(Even in 2021).