Hurricane Irene City-by-City Forecast
Hurricane Irene Tracker
Hurricane Irene: Lower Manhattan may lose power before Irene arrives, mayor says
August 27, 2011 8:14 am
Even before Hurricane Irene arrives, Lower Manhattan and other low-lying areas of the city may lose power. In other words, not only will it be extraordinarily stormy in the big city over Saturday night, it could be extra dark.Mayor Michael Bloomberg suggested that utility company Con Edison might shutdown critical facilities in Lower Manhattan as the storm approaches to prevent residents from getting trapped in elevators and water damage to power lines and other equipment.
“You can plan for a possibility of no power downtown,” Bloomberg said during a morning news conference in Coney Island where it was already drizzling.
PHOTOS: In the path of Hurricane Irene
The mayor again sternly advised New Yorkers who live in low-lying neighborhoods of the five boroughs to get moving. City officials issued an unprecedented order to more than 370,000 residents to evacuate these areas by 5 p.m.; the massive public transportation system is shutting down at noon.“This is not a joke and let’s hope that it isn’t as bad as we’re preparing for. But your life could be in danger … You could be in [a] building that doesn’t have electricity or doesn’t have elevator service.”
He later added, "Staying behind is dangerous, staying behind is foolish and it's against the law."
Surging tides and high winds could bring salt water from the East River streaming through the streets of Lower Manhattan and other neighborhoods in Brooklyn and Queens, according to a Alfonzo Quiroz, a spokesman for Con Edison.
A decision would be made about turning off power as the storm moved in, he said.
“During an intense storm like this we have networks that serve tens of thousands of customers and they all may need to be deenergized due to flooding," Quiroz said. "Taking actions like this allows us to recover quicker. There’s salt in the water and that corrodes some of our wires and makes the damage much more intense. Once the water recedes, we’re able to let the equipment dry and safely reenergize.”
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/nationnow/2011/08/mayor-lower-manhattan-may-lose-power-even-before-irene-arrives.html
Hurricane Irene Hits North Carolina, Claims First Life
Hurricane Irene, the monster storm rolling up the East Coast, has claimed its first life, a North Carolina man killed outside his home by a tree limb that blew down this morning.
The man was hit while he was walking around his house this morning in a rural area of Nash County, where winds were roaring at more than 60 mph, county Emergency Management Director Brian Brantley told the Associated Press.
The center of Hurricane Irene hit the coast of North Carolina near Cape Lookout with Category 1-force winds of 85 mph.
Hurricane warnings for the next 48 hours have been issued for North Carolina, Virginia, Washington, D.C., Maryland, Delaware, New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, coastal Connecticut, Rhode Island and Massachusetts.
So far, eastern North Carolina has already seen three tornadoes in the past few days, and the majority of the state and areas of Maryland and Virginia are under tornado watches through Sunday.
Stacy township, on the coast of North Carolina, is seeing 93 mph wind gusts this morning.
The far end of the fishing pier in Atlantic Beach, N.C. collapsed overnight. The 100-foot long pier is still standing, but its end has disappeared into the ocean.
Nearly 200,000 homes in North Carolina are experiencing power outages, according to Power Energy.
Winds up to 85 mph ripped power lines from their poles, causing many of the shortages. The hardest hit areas were Wilmington and Wrightsville Beach, N.C.
All airports in the New York area will stop accepting arrivals at noon today. The airports expected to be impacted the most are in New York (Newark, John F. Kennedy and Laguardia), Philadelphia, Penn. and Charlotte, N.C.
The American Red Cross has opened 150 shelters across the northeast and is preparing to open dozens more as the storm moves north.
"We have operations in more than a dozen states. Our priority right now is sheltering," said Gail J. McGovern, the Head of American Red Cross in a press conference this morning.
"We're now in the middle of what could be one of the largest responses the Red Cross has had in recent memory," McGovern added.
McGovern encouraged people to register on "Safe and Well," a website that allows you to inform family members that you are okay.
Evacuations began Friday in New York City with the sick and the elderly.
NYU Langone Medical Center and the Veterans Affairs Hospital in Manhattan, two campuses of Staten Island University Hospital, and Coney Island Hospital have moved hundreds of patients to higher ground.
Today, around 370,000 people in zones the city has labeled A (closest to the water) and in the Rockaways have been ordered to evacuate. It is the first time New York has ever evacuated its residents because of a hurricane. "It is better to take precautions and get out of the storm. Mother nature is much stronger than all of us," said Mayor Michael Bloomberg in a press conference Friday.
The storm is expected to weaken as it travels up the eastern seaboard, and may be reduced to a tropical storm by the time it reaches New York.
http://abcnews.go.com/US/hurricanes/hurricane-irene-hits-north-carolina-claims-life/story?id=14393026
By MIKE ESTERL in Morehead City, N.C., MICHAEL HOWARD SAUL in New York and ARIAN CAMPO-FLORES in Miami
Hurricane Irene is lashing North Carolina, with the fiercest winds on the Outer Banks expected to hit about noon. Howling winds, rain and high waves hit the coastline as the large storm brought down trees throughout eastern North Carolina, knocking out power to tens of thousands.Irene first struck land at 7:30 Saturday morning near Cape Lookout, N.C., on the southern tip of the Outer Banks, and threatened to wreak havoc along a densely populated corridor stretching from the Mid-Atlantic through New England.
Irene weakened to a Category 1 storm as it slammed into North Carolina, with maximum sustained winds around 85 mph, according to the National Hurricane Center. But forecasters said Irene remained a menacing hurricane that could topple trees and power lines, trigger heavy floods and set off storm surges as high as 11 feet. Though the storm has lost some of its strength, it is large, causing flooding and bringing down trees far inland.
Nearly 200,000 homes in North Carolina were without power Saturday morning. Hardest hit were Wilmington and Wrightsville Beach, where Progress Energy reported 190,000 customers, mostly residences, were affected, according to the Associated Press.
In New Bern, N.C., a small river-exposed city about 30 miles inland from where Irene made landfall, winds were picking up and waters were rising. Guests in ground-floor rooms of the Hilton Riverfront Hotel were told at 8:30 a.m. to move to higher floors after water flowed over the bank of the Neuse River, about 100 feet from the hotel.
Water was lapping about one foot below ground-floor rooms after roughly half a foot of rain fell in the area overnight. The National Hurricane Center warned of potential storm surges of four to eight feet in hurricane-affected areas.
About 100 miles north of Cape Lookout in Kitty Hawk, N.C., anxious guests at the Hilton Garden Inn passed the time watching The Weather Channel and taking advantage of the still-working power by firing up coffee makers, reading online news and working out at the gym.
By late morning the storm was already being felt to the north. On the eastern shore of Virginia—a thin, rural peninsula north of Norfolk—gusts of wind barreled across rippling soybean fields and an empty main highway. At times the heavy sheets of rain felt more like hail pellets than water, but the violent bursts alternated with lulls of gentle rain.
Government emergency-response units along the East Coast continued moving personnel and equipment to respond to Hurricane Irene.
The Coast Guard—which has been setting port conditions and warning mariners of the approaching storm—has also moved many of its vessels and aircraft out of Irene's direct path. In addition, six of the service's Disaster Assistance Response Teams, river-rescue units equipped with shallow-draft, flat-bottomed boats, awere staging in areas that are expected to be hit by flood waters.
Virginia Task Force 1, an urban search-and-rescue team that deployed to Japan earlier this year after a devastating earthquake and tsunami, has also been activated by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. The task force—which has its own search-and-rescue specialists, structural engineers, medical specialists, and search dogs—is staging near Fort Bragg, N.C.
In states further north airports, governments and residents continued to prepare for Irene's arrival.
In New York City, the largest city in the Irene's path, Mayor Michael Bloomberg said Saturday that power might be shut off in Lower Manhattan until Monday as a precaution against storm surges.
"You can plan on the possibility of no power downtown," the mayor said. Consolidated Edison Co. of New York will make the final decision about whether to cut the power in the coming hours, he said.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111904875404576533732485689842.html
Hurricane Irene, the monster storm rolling up the East Coast, has claimed its first life, a North Carolina man killed outside his home by a tree limb that blew down this morning.
The man was hit while he was walking around his house this morning in a rural area of Nash County, where winds were roaring at more than 60 mph, county Emergency Management Director Brian Brantley told the Associated Press.
The center of Hurricane Irene hit the coast of North Carolina near Cape Lookout with Category 1-force winds of 85 mph.
Hurricane warnings for the next 48 hours have been issued for North Carolina, Virginia, Washington, D.C., Maryland, Delaware, New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, coastal Connecticut, Rhode Island and Massachusetts.
So far, eastern North Carolina has already seen three tornadoes in the past few days, and the majority of the state and areas of Maryland and Virginia are under tornado watches through Sunday.
Stacy township, on the coast of North Carolina, is seeing 93 mph wind gusts this morning.
The far end of the fishing pier in Atlantic Beach, N.C. collapsed overnight. The 100-foot long pier is still standing, but its end has disappeared into the ocean.
Nearly 200,000 homes in North Carolina are experiencing power outages, according to Power Energy. Winds up to 85 mph ripped power lines from their poles, causing many of the shortages. The hardest hit areas were Wilmington and Wrightsville Beach, N.C.
http://abcnews.go.com/US/hurricanes/hurricane-irene-hits-north-carolina-pier-collapses-atlantic/story?id=14393026
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