Marianne and Tom report on the storm damages

Photo [and three below] by Marianne Girards, taken on 8/19/09

As the world now knows, New York City was visited by a most destructive storm two days ago. Our beloved Central Park was not spared the storm's fury. Here is a link to yesterday's New York Times detailed report:

http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/19/storm-topples-scores-of-trees-in-central-park/?pagemode=print

Yesterday, Marianne Girards, a Central Park Mother [rhymes with author] and birdwatcher, spent the afternoon with her camera at the Loch in the north part of the park, the North Woods, which bore the brunt of the storm, Here are some of the photos she took of the major area of devastation, followed by a report e-mailed to me by Tom Fiore:



Hi Marie,

I spent a good while in the northern third of Central Park, and particularly the areas north of 100 Street, and then visited Riverside Drive & Park from 90 Street to 120 Street. The damage to Central Park is even worse than I had expected, easily surpassing the 100 larger trees felled, uprooted, or with very substantial damage that probably will require removal. On the other hand, the damage from Riverside Drive & Park appears to have been exaggerated a bit, and I found less than 10 larger trees felled, uprooted or severely damaged. I looked there both along the Drive itself, just inside the park perimeter, and inside to the river's edge in several stretches. While I don't dismiss Riverside's storm damage as minimal, by comparison to Central it is a small fraction, perhaps 10% or so. Central Park will likely be cleaning up for a week or more and some areas familiar to park regulars will have a different look with the loss. At the same time, we are fortunate the damage was not worse and many trees were spared. The parks and many of their trees will live on. Also, fortunately the northernmost part of Riverside including the sanctuary was for the most part spared, with only one fairly large oak at the south end of the grove an obvious storm casualty. The trees surrounding the "drip" all appear to be intact, as do most of those in the grove.

I took hundreds of photos, but will look thru them another time.

Best,
Tom

P.S. from Marie: As some of you know, I've been temporarily grounded by a leg injury. It will be another week or so before I get to the park to see some of this myself.
Many thanks are due to Marianne and Tom for their eye-witness reports