Storm studies confirm 3 tornadoes made landfall on Long Island: National Weather Service

NEW YORK – The National Weather Service confirmed that a third tornado briefly touched down on Long Island on Saturday after conducting storm damage studies in Nassau and Suffolk County on Sunday.

The strongest tornado, an EF-1, landed at Shirley and Manorville.

They say the first report of a landing was at Woodmere, where several trees and power lines were down.

From there, the EF-0 tornado rose and jumped in places as it traveled northeast toward Hempstead, Uniondale, and Levittown.

According to the NWS, the tornado landed again in Uniondale, where it ripped off the roof of a two-story colonial building on Liberty Street, landing on a nearby home.

Scattered debris was also dumped on the next block, including the intersection of Emerson and Goodrich Street.

Significant damage was also noted near Clover Lane in Levittown, where a large tree fell on a house before the tornado lifted.

“I was actually working on my house and my wife, we had the alerts, and my wife said to start closing the doors and I was like, oh, everything is going to be fine and in five minutes I started to close a little, a little hail came and then I heard the tree fell on the neighbor’s house, “said neighbor Eddie Graboski.

A second EF-0 tornado was confirmed to have landed in East Islip, Suffolk County.

The NWS says the tornado likely made landfall at the southwest end of Hollins Lane and then continued northeast before rising over the John F. Kennedy Elementary School athletic fields.

A few dozen large oaks, maples and pines were uprooted, and several also snapped off the trunk or long branches were cut along the way.

“I ran downstairs, heard several explosions and everything shook,” Guylaine Erickson said.

Guylaine Erickson didn’t know what to do. The wind at Manorville was so violent that it capsized a family’s caravan.

“I heard the wind blowing through the house, the house creeping,” said Steve Hickey, a Manorville resident.

When Hickey came to check things out, he saw the carpet from inside the trailer, in the trees.

In Shirley, a Chipotle restaurant was badly damaged and a section of a roof was ripped from a shopping mall.

Neighbors say the fast-moving storm certainly felt like a tornado, and on Sunday night, the National Weather Service confirmed that an EF-1 did, in fact, land.

Hewlett’s photographs showed downed trees, a utility pole split in half, and debris was strewn across the ground. Teams entered and sealed off the area for security.

In New York City, high winds toppled a utility pole that fell onto an M-31 city bus on 54th Street in Hell’s Kitchen.

The storms also brought quarter-size hail along with cloud-to-ground lightning as the line raced east at 50 mph.

The video captured strong hail storms in Manhattan.

Eyewitnesses also captured images of the hail storms as they passed through New Milford, NJ.

PSEG Long Island is still working to restore power after the outages affected thousands of customers.