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 and began its gradual, destructive move up the East Coast, contributing to the deaths of at least five people
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, which instantly became urgent news hundreds of miles north, in the battened-down cities of Washington, Baltimore and, especially, New York, where city officials took the unprecedented steps of evacuating low-lying areas and shutting down the mass transit system.
Shortly after daybreak in Nags Head, N.C., on the Outer Banks, 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.
The hurricane also quickly contributed to at least three deaths in North Carolina: a man whose car hydroplaned and hit a tree; a man who was hit by a falling tree limb, and a man who had a heart attack while nailing up plywood. There were two deaths in Virginia — in Newport News, an 11-year-old boy was killed when a tree crashed through the roof of his apartment building, and in Brunswick County a man died when a tree fell on his car.
The massive storm was expected to push out to sea again later Saturday and then head north toward New York City, which prepared to face powerhouse winds and storm surges that could drive walls of water over the beaches of the Rockaway Peninsula and between the skyscrapers of Lower Manhattan.
The city scrambled to complete the evacuation of about 300,000 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. Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said mass transit was “unlikely to be back” in service on Monday, and also raised the specter of a possible electrical shutdown in parts of the city, though Con Ed said it had no immediate plans to do that.
“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 that could not be navigated in 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, seemed to speak for all concerned public officials when he told everyone to “Get the hell off the beach
