In Queens, little calm after the storm

Julio Farias looked about the rubble that was his Middle Village home.

At his feet lay bricks that had once been his chimney. To his right and left, sections of his fence hung at awkward angles. In his kitchen behind him, the ceiling was open to the sky.

Across Queens, homeowners like Farias struggled Saturday to piece together the bits of their lives battered and tossed by Thursday's violent storm.

Winds that reached 100 mph toppled the chimney on Farias' three-story house onto the kitchen roof. Saturday, Farias built a makeshift brace to keep the ceiling from collapsing further.

"My wife was in the kitchen when it hit and she thought the house was coming down," said Farias, who has lived in the house for seven years. "She was crazy with fear."

Trees blocked some 200 streets in Queens alone, City Parks Commissioner Adrian Benepe said, adding about 400 employees were working in 12-hour shifts to clear an estimated 3,000 trees.

But along the path of the storm - which blazed through Middle Village, Forest Hills, Flushing and Bayside - uncleared trees continued to snarl traffic. In Forest Hills, leveled trees littered the 1.5-acre Hawthorne Park on Burns Street, including a massive old elm whose gnarled roots formed an arboreal nook that had enchanted generations of tots.

"My wife comes here with him a lot," said Ari Buchalter, of Forest Hills, who came to see the tree with his son Benjamin, 1, who dozed in a stroller. "The damage was way beyond what I thought it was."

In Flushing, St. George's Episcopal Church stood, but without its steeple, which the wind had sheared off. In Middle Village, officials at Christ the King High School made arrangements to replace the roof, which had blown away in sheets.

"We aren't closed, but we have a lot of work to do," said Michael Michel, the school's president. "We're trying to get it done in two weeks because we have an open house on Oct. 3. And we know rains are coming."

There is a slight chance of rain Sunday and more rain possible Wednesday, according to the National Weather Service.

The destruction also reached into cemeteries on the Brooklyn-Queens border, where trees toppled tombstones, sagged onto mausoleums and tore gaps in iron fences. The loss of a pine that towered above St. John's Cemetery near Woodhaven Boulevard moved Diane Klett to tears. For years, the Glendale woman had depended on the pine to help her find her mother's grave. Saturday, she visited the resting places of relatives that go back to her great-grandparents.

"I would drive by, see the tree and know there's my mom," said Klett as the sound of chain saws and heavy equipment cut through the cemetery's windswept silence. "Now it's gone."