Irene could hit anywhere from North Carolina to New York this weekend, forecasters warned, leaving officials to wrestle with a delicate decision: Should they tell tourists to leave during one of the last weeks of the multibillion-dollar summer season?
North Carolina's Dare County, which includes the vulnerable Outer Banks, ordered visitors out by 8 a.m. Thursday and told residents to get ready for a monster storm.
The Navy ordered its 2nd Fleet ships in southeastern Virginia to prepare to get out of the way Thursday. Ships that are underway, rather than in port, can better weather such storms.
But most officials in Irene's potential path were in a wait-and-see mode. North Carolina's governor told reporters not to scare people away. "You will never endanger your tourists, but you also don't want to overinflate the sense of urgency about the storm. And so let's just hang on," Gov. Bev Perdue said.
Earlier in the week, Irene wreaked havoc elsewhere in the Caribbean, where it was blamed for two deaths: A woman in Puerto Rico and a Haitian man in the Dominican Republic were swept away by floodwaters. Impoverished Haiti, which shares the island of Hispaniola with the Dominican Republic, was left "relatively unscathed," the United Nations said.
In the Bahamas, where Irene was expected to linger Thursday, tourists cut their vacations short and caught the last flights out before the airport closed.
"I've been through one hurricane and I don't want to see another," said Susan Hooper of Paris, Ill., who curtailed a trip with her husband, Marvin, to celebrate their 23rd wedding anniversary. "My main concern is what if something happened to the airport. How would I get home?"
On the Outer Banks of North Carolina, some tourists heeded evacuation orders.
"We jam-packed as much fun as we could into the remainder of Tuesday," said Jessica Stanton Tice of Charleston, W.Va. She left Ocracoke Island on an early-morning ferry with her husband and toddler.
"We're still going to give North Carolina our vacation business, but we're going to Asheville," in the mountains, she said.
Officials said Irene could cause flooding, power outages or worse as far north as Maine, even if the eye of the storm stayed offshore.
Sandbags were in demand in the Northeast to protect already saturated grounds from flooding. Country music star Kenny Chesney moved a Sunday concert in Foxborough, Mass., up to Friday to avoid the storm. High school football games were rescheduled, and officials still hadn't decided whether to postpone Sunday's dedication of the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial on the National Mall. Hundreds of thousands were expected for the event.
Predicting the path of such a huge storm can be tricky, but the National Hurricane Center uses computer models to come up with a "cone of uncertainty," a three-day forecast that has become remarkably accurate in recent years. A weather system currently over the Great Lakes will play a large role in determining whether Irene is pushed farther to the east.
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