Central Park looked like a war zone yesterday after a storm packing 70 mph winds ripped through the lush grounds, knocking down hundreds of stately trees and damaging thousands of others.

The Central Park Conservancy, which runs the park, said it was the worst destruction seen by the group since it was created 29 years ago.

Tuesday night’s storm uprooted or snapped in half at least 300 large trees and knocked the limbs off thousands of others in a “swath of destruction,” mostly between 90th and 110th Streets, said Parks Commissioner Adrian Benepe.

“We have never seen damage this extreme in Central Park,” he said. “Central Park looks like pictures I’ve seen of heavy artillery zones in World War II.

“The tragedy is that we lost many large mature trees close to a century old. We lost some 100-year-old American elm trees that are irreplaceable.”

Some workers mounted cherry pickers or used 30-foot pruning polls to cut hanging branches off damaged trees.

“The hangers can fall at any time. That’s the real concern,” one worker said. “Some are 15 inches wide and 15 feet long. If it fell on someone, they’d be a pancake.”

On July 31, a Google engineer walking to work through the park was nearly killed when a dangling limb fell and hit him on the head. There had been severe thunderstorms the night before.

Yesterday, workers used chainsaws to cut apart the fallen trees so they could be more easily removed.

Benepe said it would take two days to assess the damage and a week to carry out the cleanup — at a cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars.

He urged people to avoid the park between 96th and 110 streets, but many people ignored him.

The park’s East Drive was blocked at 95th Street by a tree 40 inches diameter.

The storm, which struck at about 10 p.m. Tuesday, flooded roadways and downed power lines. About 1,000 Con Ed customers lost power, but it was mostly restored by afternoon. Riverside Park on the West Side also suffered tree damage.

Agnes Mueller, 44, of the Upper East Side, who was in Central Park yesterday, said, “In some ways, it’s sad these big, beautiful trees are lost, but they will grow again.”

Patrick Donovan, 38, who lives on the Upper West Side, said that when he saw the devastation, “I just picked my jaw up off the floor. I’m shocked. Don’t mess with Mother Nature.”

Additional reporting by Sabrina Ford

rebecca.rosenberg@nypost.com

