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New York Wakes to Hurricane Irene
Hurricane Irene made its second landfall, this one early Sunday in southern New Jersey, as the storm continued its relentless push toward New York City.
Though the storm weakened as it moved up the Eastern Seaboard, it continued to funnel storm surge and floodwater to the Jersey Shore overnight, where the National Hurricane Center said the center of the storm crossed over land near Little Egg Inlet, north of Atlantic City, around 5:35 a.m. The storm’s maximum sustained winds are estimated to be 75 miles per hour, making it a weak category one hurricane.
The hurricane first came ashore Saturday morning near Cape Lookout, N.C., then slipped back over water farther north near Virginia and Maryland before hitting land again in New Jersey.
New York was the next major city in the hurricane’s path, and for much of the night, the metropolitian area was pounded with heavy rain and wind, causing power failures and flooding.
While New York had all but closed down in anticipation of what forecasters warned could be violent winds with the force to drive a wall of water over the beaches in the Rockaways and between the skyscrapers of Lower Manhattan, as of early Sunday morning, all bridges and tunnels remained open, with the exception of the lower level of the George Washington Bridge because of high winds, said Steve Coleman, a spokesman for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.
Forecasters said the relentless rain from the slow-moving storm made it very dangerous.
“Even though they are saying that the storm is quote-unquote weakening, hurricane winds are hurricane winds,” John Searing, the deputy commissioner of the Suffolk County Department of Fire, Rescue and Emergency Services, said before daybreak Sunday as he prepared to deal with the damage. “Whether they say it’s 80 miles or 75 miles an hour, what’s the physical difference in that?”
City officials warned that a big problem could be flooding at high tide, at about 8 a.m. Sunday — before the storm has moved on and the wind has slacked off. The storm is expected to pass through by Sunday afternoon, moving into southern New England.
“That is when you’ll see the water come over the side,” Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg cautioned Saturday afternoon.
The National Hurricane Center warned that “water levels have been rising rapidly in advance of the center of Irene.” At 5 a.m., the center reported a storm surge of 3.1 feet at Cape May, N.J., 3.8 feet in Sandy Hook, N.J., and 3.9 feet in New York Harbor.
On the Jackie Robinson Parkway, three feet of water blocked all lanes, state and city officials reported. Floodwaters diverted traffic on the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge and shut the southbound F.D.R. drive at 116th Street. The Union Turnpike ramp on the Grand Central Parkway was shut, and on the Cross Bronx Expressway, the rising waters blocked the exit at White Plains Road.
Hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses in the New York area had lost electricity by early Sunday morning — 150,338 on Long Island, according to the Long Island Power Authority, which shut power to Fire Island, Captree Island, Robert Moses, and Oak Island; 166,000 in New Jersey, according to Public Service Electric and Gas; and about 57,992 in the city and in Westchester County, according to Consolidated Edison. Of those, more than 8,400 were on Staten Island, according to utility’s Web site, and about 5,000 in Queens and Brooklyn.
Utilities in Connecticut reported about 70,000 customers are without power, according to The Associated Press. The Connecticut Light and Power Company reported nearly 60,000 customers were without power early Sunday, and United Illuminating, which serves the Bridgeport and New Haven area, reported 10,000 customers.
“The number of outages continues to climb as Hurricane Irene moves north,” the New Jersey utility said in a statement on its Web site.
Since Friday, the city had done more than issue warnings. The subway system, one of the city’s trademarks, had shut down in the middle of the day on Saturday, and firefighters and social service workers had spent much of Saturday trying to complete the evacuation of about 370,000 residents in low-lying areas where officials expected flooding to follow the storm. In New Jersey, Gov. Chris Christie said that more than a million people had been evacuated, mainly from four counties in the southern part of the state.
The storm, a wide and relentless mass that had had lurched onto the Outer Banks of North Carolina in the early daylight hours of Saturday, heaved clumsily but implacably north, leaving in its wake at least nine deaths. After crawling slowly from North Carolina into Virginia, the storm weaved out to sea and onto a path that forecasters said would take it to Long Island and New York City.
The storm was a spinning kaleidoscope of weather, sometimes pounding windows with rain, sometimes flashing the sky with lightning, sometimes blacking out the horizon with ominous, low-riding clouds. As the hurricane moved up the East Coast, tornado watches had moved right along with it, and that lockstep continued as the storm closed in on the New York area: early Sunday, the National Weather Service announced a tornado watch for the city, along with Westchester, Suffolk, Nassau and Rockland Counties. “It’s actually common when we have these tropical systems,” said Brian Ceimnecki, a meteorologist with the Weather Service.
The Nassau County executive, Edward P. Mangano, said that “thousands” of people were spending the night in county facilities, including Nassau County Community College. He asked people in areas that were in danger to stay with friends or relatives, if possible.
The city opened 78 emergency shelters that could take in 70,000 people. But officials said that only 8,700 had arrived by 11 p.m. on Saturday. The only other statistics available pointed to the difficulty of getting people to abide by the mayor’s mandatory evacuation order in what the city calls Zone A low-lying areas: The mayor had said several hours earlier that 80 percent of the residents in some city-run buildings — but only 50 percent in others — had left.
Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo ordered 2,000 National Guard troops called up. Mr. Cuomo saw the first of them off from the 69th Regiment Armory, on Lexington Avenue at 26th Street, after saying they would assist the police, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. He also said that some would be sent to Long Island, which could face heavy damage in the storm.
Mr. Christie said 1,500 National Guard troops had been deployed in New Jersey.
The mayor attributed one casualty to the storm, a 66-year-old man who fell from a ladder while trying to board up windows at his house in Jamaica, Queens, early in the day. A Fire Department spokesman said the man, who was not immediately identified, was in serious condition at Jamaica Hospital Medical Center.
The mayor said police rescuers had pulled two kayakers from the water off Staten Island after their boats capsized. “When they were out there in spite of all the warnings, I don’t know,” the mayor said at his late-evening briefing, adding that they had been “kept afloat by lifejackets” they were wearing. He said they had been given summonses.
He also said that going out in the water as the storm approached was a “reckless” move that had “diverted badly-needed N.Y.P.D. resources.”
Mr. Bloomberg said the transit system was “unlikely to be back” in service on Monday. He said crews would have to pump water from tunnels if they flooded and restore the signal system before they could move the parked trains out. That would mean “the equipment’s not where you would want it” for the morning rush, he said. “Plan on a commute without mass transit on Monday morning.”
Mr. Bloomberg also said electricity could be knocked out in Lower Manhattan if Consolidated Edison shut off the power to pre-empt the problems that flooding could cause for its cables. (A Con Ed spokesman said later that the company, while prepared, had no immediate plans for that kind of shutdown.)
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Sources: AP, Meet The Press, MSNBC, NY Times, Youtube, Google Maps
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