Sunday March 14, Red Hook (Brooklyn) and looking to the southwest.  The bulker beyond Houma is Darya Shanthi, Weeks crane 529 offloading  salt.

Sky darkens quickly over Staten Island.  The dark plume apparent beyond  the Bayonne can be seen

zoomed in here, probably from the Bayway refineries although it looks like an ominous cyclone.  For a real waterspout foto, see this old tugster post.  Notice the Upper Bay’s  jade green water, like some tropical lagoon where coconut palms might sway and firefishes play.  In fact, didn’t Rudyard Kipling write a poem about Gowanus Bay, and something like “across the fetch from Gowanus Bay, where the sturgeon fishes play, and the dawn comes up like thunder turning Jersey into day.”  Right?

Clouds swollen and unstable with fluids, which they are, move

northeast.  Time to get back under cover.

Time elapsed in the top five fotos is less than an hour.

Below, Monday March 15, Rosebank (Staten Island) and looking northward toward a Manhattan moisture encased out beyond tanker W-O Ashley Sea.

Monday March 15,  St George (Staten Island) and looking at the aftermath on the bulkhead of the storm of March 12-today.  Gusts recorded at JFK Airport topped out at 66 mph with 4–6 inches of rainfall in the metro area.  Breezy and

(to coin a term) debris-y.  Stuff in the water that should never have been there got spewed onto land and

stuff like this ladder that should have stayed fastened down floated with the tide.  Imagine this debris multiplied one million fold floating in the EGP of the Pacific.

Someone this morning compared the storm with the “great white hurricane of 1888,” that had gusts of 80 mph and 40″ of snow in metro New York.  That link in the previous sentence makes an interesting read.  By the way, assuming a conversion of water to new-fallen snow as 1 to 6, that 6 inches of rain would have been close to 37″ of snow.  Right?

But it wasn’t, and weather for the weekend predicted (for those who don’t mind some goosebumps) t-shirt temperatures.

For Matt Soundbounder’s take on the storm from his perch on City Island, click here.  For bonnie frogma’s record of dead umbrellas and sunken sailboats, click here.  For the NYTimes slideshow of storm damage in the area, click here.

All fotos by Will Van Dorp.