East Coast prepares for historic Hurricane Irene
By Martha T. Moore, USA TODAY
Updated 36m ago
Wide, powerful, and slow-moving,
Hurricane Irene is expected to crash ashore in
North Carolina on Saturday with winds of 115 miles per hour, and millions of people along the
Eastern Seaboard are bracing for what could be a historic storm.
If Irene stays on course straight up the
East Coast, it would be the first hurricane to hit
New York City directly since 1903 and could force the evacuation of 250,000 residents there.
Irene's tropical-force winds extend almost twice as far as normal and are about the same size as Katrina, which devastated New Orleans in 2005.
Craig Fugate, head of the
Federal Emergency Management Agency, said Irene will cut a wide swath of winds and flooding as a result. "This will not just be a coastal storm," he said.
In beach towns up and down the East Coast, summer fun turned to forced retreat. Thousands of visitors to the North Carolina Outer Banks,
Ocean City, Md., and
Cape May, N.J. were ordered to evacuate. On Fire Island, off
New York, ferries began voluntary evacuations that officials said would likely become mandatory today.
Warnings about Irene's threat were increasingly dire as elected officials tried to motivate residents of flood-prone areas to prepare and, if necessary, get out. "You have to plan for the real deal here on Sunday,'' said
Steve Levy,
Suffolk County executive on eastern
Long Island.
New York,
New Jersey, Connecticut, Maryland, Virginia and North Carolina declared states of emergency. "Anyone planning to go to the shore this weekend — do not go,'' New Jersey Gov.
Chris Christie said.
Irene will be the Northeast's second rare natural event in a week, after the Virginia earthquake that struck Tuesday. The last Category 2 hurricane to hit the region was Hurricane Gloria in 1985. A Category 3 hurricane hasn't been through since the 1938 "Long Island Express'' that killed 700 people in New York and
New England, the latter of which hasn't had a hurricane since Bob in 1991.
"The citizenry is our concern,'' said Peter Judge of the Massachusetts Emergency Management Agency. "They either have never been through a hurricane or they've got hurricane amnesia."
Worsening the situation: Recent rains have soaked the ground and filled reservoirs, reducing their ability to absorb hurricane flooding and rains. In New Jersey and New York, officials pressed for the authority to release water from reservoirs in advance of the storm to improve their capacity.
In New York City, Mayor Michael Bloomberg ordered evacuations of nursing homes and hospitals in flood-prone areas and said all residents of those areas — a quarter million people — might be ordered to evacuate early Saturday. Subways and trains will stop running Saturday if winds reach 40 miles per hour.
If the storm hits the urban Northeast, officials said they expect, and dread, power outages. After Hurricane Gloria in 1985, some Long Island residents were without power for up to eight days. "If the electric stays on, our job is much much easier," Levy said. "If that electric grid goes down, then it becomes a much more difficult situation, along the lines of what we saw in Gloria, and God knows we don't want a repeat of that.''
Irene already is disrupting plans for tens of thousands of travelers. More than 200 flights have already been cancelled, and the storm likely will force hundreds of flights to be cancelled through the weekend and create delays that could ripple across the USA. Most of the major airlines have waived penalties for rebooking flights to affected cities.
Lisa Sorice of Brick Township, N.J., wheeled two cases of bottled water in her cart Thursday afternoon at Walmart . Batteries for her flashlights were next on the list.
"I figured I'd get ready now,'' said Sorice, who has lived in the area for 12 years. "I am thinking this one's going to be a lot worse than the rest of them if it does hit here. I'm afraid actually, this time, than I was of ones in the past."
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