Parkway Tragedy

When John Hynes of Elmont drove onto the Cross Island Parkway on Sunday morning, he couldnt have known that he was going to narrowly escape danger that day.
Luckily, he avoided being seriously injured by a falling tree branch that took the life of Rikers Island corrections officer Gary Spitzer.
"I really have no scratches or cuts, I have glass in my foot and my hand, but they were just pieces. Spitzer was in a smaller car and I was in a Ford Explorer," Hynes said.
On the day of the accident, Hynes was on his way to his job at the Javits Convention Center. The traffic was light between the Grand Central Parkway and the Long Island Expressway exits. The roads were a little wet with rain from the night before.
He drove past the exit for the Grand Central Parkway, went under the tunnels and then noticed that the driver ahead of him had suddenly hit his brakes.
"I happened to look up and I see the tree branch starting to fall," he said.
According to Hynes, the branch was about 40 feet long, covering three lanes of the northbound side of the Cross Island. When he saw the limbs falling, he hit his brakes, as did the two cars in front of him. But once the limb crashed to the pavement, the impact caused smaller, but no less formidable, pieces of wood to go flying.
"Then all the other limbs and branches of the one limb, which was the size of a small tree, just came on top of us and all of a sudden, that was it," he recounted.
When it was over, Hynes got out of his vehicle and looked around in a daze, before checking on the driver of another car that had been pelted with pieces of debris.
Within 10 minutes, police, ambulances and the fire department arrived on the scene. It took firefighters 25 minutes to clear the whole limb off the parkway using axes and chain saws.
"It all happened so fast, it was incredible. A freak of nature," said Hynes. "I dont know if it was old or rotten from the rain, but still it shouldnt be hanging over a parkway covering two, three lanes like that."
Amazingly, Hynes walked away with no scratches or cuts. The other two drivers were taken to area hospitals for minor injuries and Spitzer was pronounced dead at the scene.
The tree that had been supporting the lethal limb did not make it out of the incident unscathed, but Hynes made a point of taking a piece of the fallen limb home as a memento, after the accident.
"I made a point of saying something to a group of officers about how it was not safe. They definitely saw that and someone acted on that and had the whole thing cut down," he said. "I hope the city goes around and takes care of the other branches."
Hynes said that the incident could happen again because there are many more large, precarious branches hanging over the parkway. Nonetheless, he was grateful to the emergency vehicles that arrived at the scene so quickly.
"I just woke up this morning and said thank you God," said Hynes, whose wife is expecting a baby in two weeks. "I didnt get hurt as bad as it could have been. Im just a little bit sore and bruised from everything."