The truck that Luis Mejía uses to work in construction and that he always parked here where a tree trunk fell.
He was lucky because his vehicle was not affected: “I was saying thank God that I did not park my car higher but it did affect the two cars there of the neighbors.”
And the thing is, the strong winds on Sunday uprooted a tree in the block of 62nd Street, between Third and Fourth Avenues.
The intensity of the winds reached 70 miles per hour. The log smashed the windshield of a Toyota brand SUV and branches fell on the hood of this other.
The impact was very strong, explains Alex Núñez, who came to think that it had been an explosion. But he was not surprised to see that this particular tree had been blown over by the winds.
She says that she had complained to the city because she had noticed that the tree -which was in front of her house- seemed unstable: “I don’t even know how many times I have called the city. The problems began about eight years ago because they always Trees always fell when it rained. They always fell and I always had to knock. ”
The Parks Department says it answered the call in September of last year and that upon inspection, it determined that the tree was in acceptable condition at that time.
Winds must exceed 60 miles per hour for a tree of this size to root itself out.
Fortunately, this time there were no injuries. But the neighbors fear that this will happen again through trees like this one, which they consider too fragile: “We thought that one there was a little more turned. It is a miracle that there was no person in the area where the tree fell.”
Someone else added: “It is disastrous what happened, mainly because of the car owners. But thank God something bigger didn’t happen.”
The car of Jennifer Pimentel’s husband almost fell on the trunk, but only the dry branches scratched the paint of the vehicle and he was able to remove it, but he was scared by the noise of the collapse: “Very, very loud. All the vehicle alarms they went off and it was terrible it was kind of scary. “
About 12 hours after the tree fell off, Parks Department workers were working to remove it and clear the streets.
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