tornado type storm

This past thursday was a normal day at work I knew we were expecting some heavy rain and as always I always hope I make it home before the bad weather starts and that my husband doesn't get stuck at work and I have to pick up my son b/c I'm always afraid that I will get caught with my son outside in bad weather I hate thunder and lightning it scares the crap out of me anyway I got home and I have to admit the skies looked very dark gray and pretty scary but the last thing I would've imagined was that we would get a tornado type storm especially in NYC of all areas.  Well in the evening all of a sudden I hear the loud boom of thunder and I hear the rain coming down very heavy and then the strong wind it didn't even sound normal it sounded like a loud screeching and it scared the heck out of me i'm sure some hail came down too what I didn't expect was for the storm to cause the damage it did.  In my area of queens there were several trees that got damaged three blocks were closed down due to damaged trees one of them falling on top of a pick up truck and many down power lines, the tree clean up crews and Con Ed was pretty busy that day.  I wake up Friday morning and I hear that all of the trains were messed up and my train was suspended and I think darn it would be a mission for me to get to the J and L train after dropping my son off so I said screw this I'm staying home I didn't know how long it was going to take for them to fix the mess and I sure didn't feel like going through an obstacle course just to get to work late and have to stay late and on top of that my usual tiredness from the whole week said I'm staying home lol.  I then went to drop off my son and I have to walk on the other side of the street b/c an entire tree branch blocked the way, the buses were unbelievably crowded I had to let two full buses pass by until the third one came and I finally got on it.  I had a "me" day on friday and it felt good to have some time to myself.  Middle Village, Queens got pretty messed up lots of damaged trees, power lines and messed up sidewalks Park Slope also got it bad i'm sure other places got it bad too but those are the ones I just hear about in the news.  I hear the clean up is going to be pretty costly, with all of the down power lines I'm suprised we didn't lose our power.  I think we New Yorkers should take this storm as a wake up call and ask ourselves are we really prepared to deal with a major natural disaster should it strike NYC? I don't think we are we're not used to dealing with hurricanes, tornadoes on a regular basis like a lot of southern states and other parts of the country.  I try to always have working flash lights candles batteries battery operated radio but how about food, etc.  Most people aren't prepared like they should be and most are too busy dealing with daily day to day life but this storm should be an eye opener that we need to prepare ourselves just in case.  I'm going to upload some pictures eventually when I figure out how to do it lol.  I'm just glad that it's over and hope it doesn't happen again but we really never know with mother nature.