Hurricane Irene Pushes North With Deadly Force
COINJOCK, N.C. — Weakened but unbowed, Hurricane Irene mowed across coastal North Carolina and Virginia and churned up the Atlantic Seaboard on Saturday night 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 cleanup. Downed and denuded trees. Impassable roadways. <a href="http://www.monclerjacketscoats2011.com/"><strong>moncler discount</strong></a> 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. Along the Atlantic Seaboard, and most particularly in New York, officials frantically tried to convince people to heed evacuation orders. In a news conference on Saturday night, New York City’s mayor, Michael R. Bloomberg, told residents that the time to evacuate was over: they should stay put and ride out the storm. He said it was time “to focus on what to do where you are.” 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 per hour, with occasional stronger gusts. The hurricane also quickly contributed to at least six 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. Three 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; in Brunswick County, a tree fell on a car and killed a man; and the Associated Press reported that the most recent death, in Chesterfield County, was caused by toppled trees. By Saturday evening, the massive storm was continuing north <a href="http://www.canadagoosejackets-discount.com"><strong>canada goose discount</strong></a> at 13 miles an hour, and producing tornado watches and warnings from Delaware to New York City. Laurie Hogan, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service’s operations on Long Island, said that the storm was expected to hit there a little after 8 a.m. on Sunday. It was expected to cause storm surges of seven feet at the southern tip of Staten Island, and of 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 <a href="http://www.monclerjacketscoats2011.com/moncler-womens-coats-c-13.html"><strong>moncler coat women</strong></a> in areas where officials expected flooding to follow the storm, including in 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 no buses, subways or commuter trains in the metropolitan area would be in service all day on Sunday, either. In Maryland, after high winds reached about 55 m.p.h., the Chesapeake Bay Bridge was closed, officials there said. 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 Consolidated Edison 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 made 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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