Hurricane Sandy has caused enormous devastation across eastern America, leaving dozens of people dead and huge cities without power.
Residents on Long Island, New York, felt the wrath of Superstorm Sandy after it uprooted their massive oak tree, sending it crashing into a neighbors’ garden.
Capturing the freak accident on camera, Mathew Weinschreider, from Huntington, could only gasp in horror as the lawn heaved and the tree’s roots slowly emerged from the ground.
As the video shows, the lawn eventually opened, the roots broke through and the tree succumbed to the hurricane-force winds rattling the East Coast.
Fortunately for his family, the tree toppled away from their home and instead landed across a fence before smashing into a neighbor’s garden, narrowly avoiding their house.
Matthew Weinschreider’s garden was left covered with soil while next door’s filled with branches.
Only when one of the residents went outside to survey the damage could the sheer size of the felled tree be recognized, its raised roots dwarfing the man.
Matthew Weinschreider uploaded the video to YouTube, where it has already been viewed more than 60,000 times since Monday.
While falling trees have claimed scores of lives since Sandy came ashore, no one was injured in the incident in Huntington.
Hurricane Sandy landed in New York on Monday evening, terrorizing the area with 80 mph winds and storm surges that downed power lines, submerged homes with floodwater and sparked deadly car crashes.
The wind also snapped a crane in Manhattan, leaving it to dangle precariously above the Midtown West skyline, with officials too wary of the high winds to attempt to bring it down.
At least 26 of the 61 reported fatalities from the storm occurred in New York, with five on Long Island.
These included a motorcyclist who collided with a van after traffic lights stopped working, a car crash between a vehicle and a police car, a body washed up in East Hampton and two deaths by felled trees.
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