Jim Lo Scalzo/European Pressphoto Agency
Waves crashed into Avalon Pier as Hurricane Irene struck the Outer Banks in Kill Devil Hills, N.C., on Saturday. More Photos »
By KIM SEVERSON, DAN BARRY and CAMPBELL ROBERTSON
Published: August 27, 2011
This article was reported by Kim Severson, Dan Barry and Campbell Robertson and was written by Mr. Barry.
WILMINGTON, N.C. — After several anxious days of dire forecasts that forced much of the East Coast into unprecedented levels of lockdown, a weakened but still ferocious Hurricane Irene made landfall on Saturday morning along the southern coast of North Carolina.
It announced itself with howling winds, hammering rains and a gradual, destructive move northward toward the battened-down cities of Washington, New York and Boston.
Shortly after daybreak in Nags Head, on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, surging waves ate away at the dunes, while winds peeled the siding from vacated beach houses — as if to challenge the National Hurricane Center’s early morning decision to downgrade Irene to a Category 1 hurricane, whose maximum sustained winds would reach only — only — 90 miles an hour, with occasional stronger gusts.
“Some weakening is expected after Irene reaches the coast of North Carolina,” an update by the hurricane center at 8 a.m. said. “But Irene is forecast to remain a hurricane as it moves near or over the mid-Atlantic states and New England.”
The massive storm was expected to push out to sea again later Saturday and then head north toward New York, where the specter of an electrical shutdown was added to the list of potential consequences. The region prepared to face powerhouse winds that could drive a wall of water over the beaches of the Rockaway Peninsula and between the skyscrapers of Lower Manhattan.
The city scrambled to complete evacuation of about 300,000 residents in low-lying areas where officials expected flooding to follow the storm. Officials also ordered the entire public transportation system — subways, buses and commuter rail lines — to shut down Saturday for what they said was the first time in history. Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said mass transit was “unlikely to be back” in service on Monday, but electricity in Lower Manhattan could remain out.
“This is just the beginning,” the mayor said at a morning news conference in Coney Island, Brooklyn, where he and Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly inspected boats that emergency workers could use in neighborhoods they could not travel through any other way. “This is a life-threatening storm.”
Officials said the central concern at the moment was the storm surge of such a large, slow-moving hurricane — the deluge to be dumped from the sky or thrown onto shore by violent waves moving like snapped blankets. “I would very much take this seriously,” Brian McNoldy, a research associate of the Department of Atmospheric Research at Colorado State University, said. “Don’t be concerned if it’s a Category 1, 2, 3, 4. If you’re on the coast, you don’t want to be there. Wind isn’t your problem.”
Mazie Swindell Smith, the county manager in Hyde County, N.C., which is expecting storm surge from the inland bay that abuts it, agreed. “The storm is moving more slowly than expected,” Ms. Smith said. “That’s not good as far as rainfall, because it will just sit here and dump rain.”
With the first hurricane to make landfall in the continental United State since 2008, government officials issued evacuation orders for about 2.3 million people, according to The Associated Press — from 100,000 people in Delaware to 1 million people in New Jersey, where the governor, Chris Christie, told everyone to “Get the hell off the beach.” And in New York City, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg took the historic step of ordering the evacuation of several waterfront areas, including Manhattan’s Battery Park City.
On Saturday, both Mayor Bloomberg and Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York were stressing the seriousness of the situation, telling residents in the evacuation zones to get out for their own safety. On Friday, city officials issued what they called an unprecedented order for the evacuation of about 370,000 residents of low-lying areas, while on Long Island, county and town officials ordered a mandatory evacuation of about 400,000 people.
Irene was projected to hug the coast throughout Saturday and make landfall again around midday on Sunday on Long Island, just east of New York City. That track gives the city a bit of a break, because the east side of a hurricane is more powerful than the west, though there might be storm surges of four to eight feet.
“They’re going to be on the west side, but they’re still going to get strong winds and storm surge,” John Guiney, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service, said.
Hurricane watches were posted and states of emergency declared for Delaware, Maryland, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, New England, New Jersey, New York and Virginia. Amtrak canceled train service for parts of the Northeast Corridor for the weekend, and airlines began canceling flights, urging travelers to stay home. Broadway shows shut down. Major League Baseball games were postponed.
Most airlines have grounded flights this weekend, in the New York City area and beyond, and Newark Liberty International Airport, Kennedy International Airport and La Guardia Airport were set to close at noon on Saturday in anticipation of the severe weather. Michael Trevino, a spokesman for the merged United Airlines and Continental Airlines, said 2,300 flights would be canceled. A JetBlue spokesman said the airline had grounded 1,252 flights in the New York area and beyond starting Saturday.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency, still seeking to redeem itself from its spotty performance after Hurricane Katrina in 2005, had 18 disaster-response teams in place along the East Coast, with stockpiles of food, water and mobile communications equipment ready to go. The Coast Guard: more than 20 rescue helicopters and reconnaissance planes ready to take off. The Defense Department: 18 more helicopters set aside for response. The National Guard: about 101,000 members available to respond. The American Red Cross: more than 200 emergency response vehicles and tens of thousands of ready-to-eat meals in areas due to be hit by the storm.
FEMA has also moved onto the Internet and social media in a big way, with Craig Fugate, the FEMA director, posting updates on Twitter several times an hour about the agency’s response and the status of the storm.
“The category of the storm does not tell the whole story,” Mr. Fugate wrote Saturday morning on his Twitter feed, after Hurricane Irene was downgraded to a Category 1 storm. “Some of our Nation’s worst flooding came from tropical storms.”
President Obama ended his vacation early by flying back Friday night from Martha’s Vineyard to be in Washington for the storm. In advance of Irene’s arrival, he had issued federal emergency declarations for New Hampshire, North Carolina, Massachusetts, Virginia, New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island and New Jersey, clearing the way for federal support to respond to the hurricane.
The toll being exacted on North Carolina — even before the hurricane’s eye wall reached land just east of Cape Lookout — augured what was likely in store for other states along the Atlantic Seaboard, with some 50 million people possibly affected. Downed trees. Damaged municipal buildings. The flooding of the communities of Wrightsville Beach and Carolina Beach. The partial collapse of a pier in Atlantic Beach. The suspension of a search for a teenage male who jumped off a boat ramp and disappeared into the churning waters outside Wilmington; officials said the dangerous weather would delay a search until sometime Saturday afternoon for the young man.
North Carolina officials said another man was killed near Nashville, N.C., when a tree branch fell on him while he was walking in his yard. And a surfer was killed in Virginia beach, Va., while testing the massive waves in advance of the storm’s arrival.
By Saturday morning, some 200,000 customers had lost power in North Carolina, according to Progress Energy, with the utility expecting more blackouts as the hurricane moved inland. Power was out for about half of the 106,000 residents in the port city of Wilmington. After a night of fierce winds that gusted to nearly 80 miles an hour, people emerged from their homes to downed trees, darkened traffic lights — and a collective sense of having been spared the worst of the storm’s wrath.
Judy and Greg Harvey, out-of-towners from Philadelphia, were surprised by how the locals had taken the storm in stride. The Harveys had driven in from Philadelphia to care for his mother, who was in a hospice that had shut down at 6 p.m. Friday and was keeping visitors out of the facility until noon Saturday. This made for a maddeningly long morning for the couple — “She could be gone, actually,” said Judy Harvey — but a morning allowing for observation of the area’s post-storm reaction.
“No one seems to be too upset at all,” Ms. Harvey said. “They just shut everything down and pull the metal grates across the windows and wait.”
Meanwhile, at the New Hanover Regional Medical Center in Wilmington, about 100 children had spent the night in sleeping bags and inflatable beds, arriving with staff members who had to work and parents from the area who wanted a safe place to wait the storm out. A band of doctors in scrubs entertained them with soft rock.
Twelve babies were born during the night. According to a hospital nurse, the parents of two of them were said to be considering the middle name Irene.
In Curritack County, all bridges connecting the mainland to the Outer Banks had been shut down, save for last-minute and emergency traffic, and the main highways were eerily quiet.
On Friday, several business owners along the main thoroughfare had bravely insisted that they would remain open through the storm. But by Saturday morning it appeared that, having woken up to powerful gusts of car-rattling winds and driving rain, these merchants had reconsidered. For example, the spray-painted word “Open” adorned the plywood covering a local 7-Eleven, but the door was locked, and a small sign listed numbers to call in case of emergency.
These were the first on-the-ground manifestations of what most people had experienced only through the multi-colored radar maps that appeared on television, beside meteorologists wearing studied looks of concern. These maps showed a cone-shaped mass of reds, yellows and greens inching north from the Bahamas.
Perhaps the most breathtaking, even humbling, images came from some 200 miles up, via the International Space Station. Photographs taken by astronauts showed what looked like a massive swirl of mashed potatoes straddling the edge of the green plate of the United States.
“If you were to just put it on a map of the United States, it would go from South Florida to Pennsylvania, and from North Carolina to eastern Oklahoma,” Mr. McNoldy said. “It’s big, yeah.”
Kim Severson reported from Wilmington, N.C., Dan Barry from New York and Campbell Robertson from Coinjock, N.C. Brian Stelter contributed reporting from Nags Head, N.C., Shaila Dewan from New York and Eric Lipton from Washington.
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