Chain saws cutting up downed trees. This is what waking up the morning after a tornado looks and sounds like.

The National Weather service says the storm that tore through the College Point, Whitestone and Malba areas of Queens Thursday night was a tornado.

"Boom! Like all hell broke loose," said one resident.

"The wind just picked up, the chairs went flying, the flagpole fell down, the lights went out. The big tree fell in front of the house, my husband is on oxygen 24/7. So they had to take him to the hospital," a College Point resident said.

National Weather Service workers spent Friday morning inspecting the damage before confirming the tornado strike.

They said it touched down at 10:20 p.m. near Saint Fidelis Catholic Church on 14th Ave. in Collage Point and carved a 300-foot wide path for three-quarters of a mile through northern Queens, with winds of 70 to 85 mph, the lowest rung on the tornado intensity scale.

The storm pulled down power lines, flattened more than 50 trees and even peeled the siding off of homes before reaching the East River near the Whitestone Bridge.

"Once it actually got to the area and actually saw the water, it dissipated,” said Ross Dickman, the meteorologist-in-charge of the National Weather Service’s New York office. “That was near the base of the Whitestone Bridge. Fortunately the tornado didn't strengthen and cross over into the bridge area."

It was the first tornado to hit the five boroughs since 2012. Two years before that, in 2010, a tornado tore a path of destruction through neighboring Flushing and Bayside. Dickman says Thursday night's storm was much weaker than the 2010 weather event.

"With 125 mile an hour winds, we saw a lot more damage," he said.

Dickman says Thursday’s tornado was made possible by a warm, unstable air mass moving through the area. While such storms are rare in the city, he advises people to take those cellphone weather alerts seriously--and seek shelter the next time a tornado warning flashes.