It came blowing out of the northwest, blackening the sky on what had been, until then, a sunny and balmy Labor Day afternoon.

Within minutes of the arrival of the squall line -- a ridge of intense thunderstorms that would touch off tornadoes in Bethpage, Great Neck, and Lynbrook -- dozens of trees would be uprooted and at least one neighborhood in Westbury found itself under nearly two feet of water.

"It was just amazing," said Richard Panchyk, of Lewis Avenue. "I looked out the window when it first started raining... and it looked like it was raining pretty hard. Ten minutes later, I looked out and the street was completely covered with water. Ten minutes after that, we had standing water six inches from our front door.

"Several people had their basements flooded, their cars damaged... I even saw railroad ties that people had used for landscaping floating by."

Elsewhere in the area, on Fifth and Gordon Avenues, Willow Street, and Winnie Court in Carle Place, trees, some of them as much as 30 and 40 years old, toppled to the ground.

Still, Lewis Avenue, where many of the homes are between 80 and 100 years old, appears to have borne the brunt of the fast-moving storm. So intense was the rain and wind that the sewers many in the area had come to see as a blessing quickly got clogged with debris.

As hail, some of it the size of a nickel, rained down upon them, a number of local residents ran out of their homes in an attempt to move their cars to higher ground.

Unfortunately, the movement of the cars created waves, and those waves sent water up and over residence windows and cascading into basements, particularly those basements on the low-lying, south side of the street.

"I guess I'd always assumed that if we got flooded, the water would rise from the basement floor," said Panchyk, who lost a collection of record albums due to the flood. "But we had splash marks two feet up the wall."

Panchyk and his wife live in a home built in 1913 by one James Toppley, who was employed on an Old Westbury estate.

Ethel Hall, who has lived across the street from the house since 1920, said that many, many years ago some flooding was common, but that after the sewers were installed that problem seemed to dissipate.

"In all the years I've been here, I have to tell you, I really haven't seen it the way it was the other day," she said.

And yet there were telltale signs that this kind of flooding must have occurred at some point.

The house where the Panchyks live and several others on the block were constructed by the Seaman Brothers, turn-of-the-century builders who lived over on Liberty Avenue in Westbury.

The entire neighborhood stands on former farm land, and because the south side of Lewis Avenue is some six to eight inches lower than the north side -- Ethel Hall, for instance -- has never had a problem with flooding -- the Seamans built a retaining wall around the Toppley property, a wall that rises to a height of eight feet around the back.

Also incorporated into the design of the home were several "holes," there's no other way to describe them, set into the basement floor.

"My wife and I had wondered what they were for when we moved in," Panchyk said. "Now we know. They're drains."

Though such situations are common on suburban streets built over the sites of former ponds, Ethel Hall, for one, said that there never was a pond where Lewis Street now lies.

"Sure, before the sewers, it would get flooded in a heavy rain, but a standing pond near Lewis Avenue... I'd have to say, no to my recollection," Hall said.

According to Panchyk, two hours after the storm, after one of the neighbors had somewhat cleared the sewer drain, "you wouldn't have known anything had happened here -- except, of course, for the debris. Like the six inches of tree material I had pressed against my fence."

Trees were very much on the mind of Ethel Hall after the storm. She said she always wished she had a big tree on her property, but having heard that so many were humbled by the weather, she's begun to change her mind.

"You know, it really was like something out of a dream," Panchyk said. "It was like something out of a movie or a scene on the news from another part of the country, like Iowa. You never expect that kind of storm to happen here."