Snow and ice from snow plow smash through Brooklyn building's windows

Josh Einiger Image
Thursday, March 16, 2017
EXCLUSIVE: Snow and ice from snow plow smash through Brooklyn building's windows
Josh Einiger has the exclusive report from Sunset Park.

SUNSET PARK, Brooklyn (WABC) -- Windows on a Brooklyn building were shattered, and residents are blaming aggressive snow plowing.

The video obtained by Eyewitness News shows the moment the sky fell on Third Avenue in Sunset Park.

Giant chunks of ice that were plowed off the Gowanus Expressway.

"I hear the explosion and my granddaughter is screaming," said Vargaes Lopez Diomedes, young girl's godmother.

It went right into 9-year-old Caitlin Morales's bedroom.

"It broke a lot of the window and a lot of the glass came in," Caitlin said.

"I was crying! I saw bleeding," Diomedes said.

Caitlin's face was cut by flying glass, and it came very close to her eye.

"I thought that the snow plow was just going to come and hit the window like it usually did," Caitlin said. "But it came faster than usual and it brought a lot of snow with it and hit the window. And that's what broke it."

That window and as many as a dozen other windows on both sides of Third Avenue were broken.

"From the highway, that's where it came from," a worker said.

It was all apparently thanks to city snowplows, scraping the sides of the Gowanus Expressway above.

"You hear them, you hear when the trucks are coming," said Alex Santiago, neighborhood resident. "It's like a railroad up there and you just got to run underneath the highway because you know it's going to come off the highway."

For decades, people there say they've been living with this problem, in a stretch of the Gowanus where the road widens and gets within a car length of walkups on either side.

"She's refusing to sleep in that room. She is terrified," said Clarissa Rios, Caitlin's mother. "When they're up there, they do not take consideration that there are buildings here. People who live here, she could have been more seriously hurt."

"Just watch where the apartments are so they don't end up breaking another window," Caitlin said.