Weakened but unbowed, Hurricane Irene mowed across coastal North Carolina and Virginia on Saturday as it churned up the Atlantic Seaboard toward a battened-down New York City, where officials had taken what were called the unprecedented steps of evacuating low-lying areas and shutting down the mass transit system in advance of the storm’s expected midmorning arrival on Sunday.
Announcing itself with howling winds and hammering rains, the hurricane made landfall at Cape Lookout, on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, around 7:30 a.m., ending several days of anxious anticipation and beginning who knows how many more days of response and clean-up. Downed and denuded trees. Impassable roadways. Damaged municipal buildings. Widespread flooding. The partial loss of a modest civic center’s roof, forcing the relocation of dozens of people who had found shelter there.
Across the Atlantic Seaboard, and most particularly in New York, officials frantically tried to convince people to heed evacuation orders. “Staying behind is dangerous, staying behind is foolish, and it’s against the law,” New York City’s mayor, Michael R. Bloomberg, said Saturday, amid reports that some people — in his city as well as in other communities — were not heeding evacuation orders. “And we urge everyone in the evacuation zones not to wait until gale-force winds.
“The time to leave is right now.”
In Nags Head, N.C., on the Outer Banks, the day began with surging waves eating 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.
The hurricane also quickly contributed to at least five deaths. In North Carolina, three men died: one whose car hydroplaned and hit a tree, another who was hit by a falling tree limb and a third who had a heart attack while nailing up plywood. Two more people died in Virginia: in Newport News, a fallen tree crashed through the roof of an apartment building and killed an 11-year-old boy, while in Brunswick County, a tree fell on a car and killed a man.
By Saturday evening, the massive storm was pushing back out to sea and continuing north at about 13 miles an hour. Laurie Hogan, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service’s operations on Long Island, said that the storm was expected to hit Long Island a little after 8 a.m. on Sunday, and cause storm surges of seven feet at the southern tip of Staten Island, and more than five feet at Battery Park, at the bottom of Manhattan.
By Sunday evening, Ms. Hogan said, southern Pennsylvania, New Jersey and New York will have received as much as nine inches of rain. Flooding is a particular concern, she added, because the ground in New Jersey, for example, is already saturated from heavy rains over the last month. New York City scrambled to complete the evacuation of about 370,000 residents in areas where officials expected flooding to follow the storm, including Battery Park City in Lower Manhattan. 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. Officials in Boston announced late Saturday that all buses, subways and commuter trains in that metro area would cease service all day Sunday, as well. And as gusts reached 72 to 80 miles an hour in Maryland, transportation officials closed the Chesapeake Bay Bridge.
Mayor Bloomberg said mass transit in New York was “unlikely to be back” in service on Monday. He also raised the specter of electrical shutdowns in parts of the city, though the power company Con Ed said it had no immediate plans to take such dire action.
Federal, state and local officials along the East Coast strongly recommended that people not be fooled into complacency by the hurricane’s loss of wind speed once it hit landfall. They said that a central concern 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.
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