Hurricane Irene poised to hit New York hard

Local forecasters said the path of Irene was shifting westward, putting the city squarely on the wrong side of the storm and raising the prospect of 10-foot storm surges. By 1 a.m. ET the city's Central Park had already gotten two inches of rain, with much more expected.

If the forecasts bear out, it would lend some support to Mayor Michael Bloomberg's order for the evacuation of low-lying areas such as Manhattan's financial district. Just across the Hudson River from the district in Hoboken, New Jersey, an evacuation shelter had to be evacuated itself due to flooding.

"Conditions are expected to deteriorate rapidly," a tired-looking Bloomberg told a news conference late on Saturday, urging people to stay indoors. "The storm is now finally hitting New York City. The winds will increase, the rain will increase and the tidal surge will increase."

By all accounts, most heeded his plea to shelter in place, but Times Square still proved irresistible to some tourists who had nothing better to do.

"We just came to see how few people are in Times Square and then we're going back," said Cheryl Gibson, an Edmonton, Canada, resident who has been on vacation in the city for a week and had been planning to go to the other side of the Hudson River on Sunday.

"We can't get to New Jersey and I'm not sure it's any better there," she said.

Further up the street, on a pedestrian mall, a group of firefighters from Vancouver in town for the World Police and Fire Games played an impromptu game of street hockey.

Despite the pouring rain, many played bare-chested, but the game did not last -- approximately 20 New York police officers broke up the game with no arrests.

NO SHELTER

By mid-evening, one of the many umbrella sellers who pop up all over New York whenever it rains was sold out -- he said it had been a good day for sales, but he was not planning to take shelter from the storm.

"My shelter used to be on the trains but now they stopped that," said the man, who declined to give his real name but said "Call me Motown."

"This is what keeps me going," he added, pointing to the small portable radio playing music in his cart. "Hey, listen, it's 'Walking in the rain,'" he said with a laugh.

While Motown was in good cheer despite the storm, the situation grew increasingly serious overnight. At least 8,000 customers were already without electricity in the city, hours before the worst of the wind and rain hit. Most were in Staten Island though at least one was also out in Manhattan.

Both the Henry Hudson Parkway on Manhattan's west side and FDR Drive to the island's east were starting to flood, with heavy pooling and tow trucks strategically idling on the sides of the road. The city's mass transit system, including subways, was shut down from the middle of Saturday.

After Bloomberg ordered the unprecedented evacuation of 370,000 people living in neighborhoods near the water's edge, more than 3,700 took refuge in the city's shelters, thousands more fled to the homes of friends or relatives and others defiantly stayed behind.

A smattering of food and liquor stores stayed open while the public transit system that moves 8.5 million people each weekday halted operations, also a first.

The giant 580-mile (930-km)-wide storm unleashed 8O miles per hour (130 km per hour) winds, grounding aircraft all along the heavily populated eastern seaboard.

While shelters were mostly empty, others such as the John Adams High School in Queens overflowed.

At the Brooklyn Tech High School shelter, evacuees watched weather reports on a large television screen in the auditorium while others dined on mozzarella sticks, string beans, milk and apple sauce.

"I didn't want to leave (home), I wanted to stay, but I feared for my life. I didn't want to get stuck in the dark and in the flood," said Margie Robledo, 58, of Coney Island, who just arrived in New York from Puerto Rico, where the storm had hit days earlier.

CALM IN THE DANGER ZONE

Others defied the evacuation order after Bloomberg announced police would not enforce it. Despite the persistent warnings and ominous skies, the neighborhood around Brooklyn's Coney Island -- within the danger zone -- was calm. Parked cars lined the streets, and there was no sign of a mass exodus.

"They are right, we should be evacuating, but we are not," said John Visconti, 47, who owns an auto repair business and lives on the ground floor of his building in the nearby Brighton Beach area of Brooklyn. "We just want to stay home and hope for the best. We should be OK."

The evacuation zones included shiny apartment buildings in Manhattan's wealthy Battery Park City, working class Red Hook in Brooklyn and run-down public housing in Coney Island -- all neighborhoods at the water's edge.

"If the neighborhood is eventually legitimately flooded, I have food and books and whiskey," said attorney Neal D'Amato, 31, sipping a beer at the Red Hook Bait and Tackle shop bar.

He said he would ride out the storm in his fourth-floor apartment.

Hurricane Irene could strengthen, U.S. forecasters warn

HATTERAS, N.C. -- As Hurricane Irene roared across the Bahamas on Wednesday packing 120-mph winds, the National Hurricane Center in Miami warned that it could strengthen to Category 4 and 135-mph winds by Thursday.

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.

Hurricane Irene marks 1st big US threat in years

MIAMI (AP) — The rapidly intensifying Irene that's already cut a destructive path through the Caribbean is the first hurricane to seriously threaten the U.S. in almost three years, a worry for some emergency management officials who hope people haven't become complacent about the dangers.

The U.S. National Hurricane Center in Miami said Irene was likely to become a major Category 3 hurricane by Wednesday. By Thursday as it roars toward the U.S. coast over warm open waters, it could become a Category 4 with winds of 131 mph (210 kph) or more, NHC hurricane specialist John Cangialosi said late Monday. Winds in such a storm can blow from 131 to 155 mph.

The last hurricane to make landfall in the U.S. was Ike, which pounded Texas in 2008.

For now, the first Atlantic hurricane of the season had maximum sustained winds early Tuesday around 100 mph (160 kph) and was centered about 50 miles (85 kilometers) northeast of Puerto Plata in the Dominican Republic. The hurricane was moving west-northwest near 12 mph (19 kph) and could eventually land in Florida, Georgia or the Carolinas.

"We want to make sure Floridians are paying attention," said Bryan Koon, director of the Florida Division of Emergency Management, who met Monday with the governor. "We are at the height of the hurricane season right now. If it's not Hurricane Irene, it could be the follow-up storm that impacts us."

After several extremely active years, Florida has not been struck by a hurricane since Wilma raked across the state's south in October 2005. That storm was responsible for at least five deaths in the state and came two months after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans.

"For residents in states that may be affected later this week, it's critical that you take this storm seriously," said Craig Fugate, administrator at the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Julio Gonzalez in Miami was heeding the warnings and headed to a hardware store to pick up what he needed to protect his home.

"I'm gonna board up," he said Monday. "It's best to play it safe."

Others were stocking up on bottled water and plywood. And Hurricane Irene was trending on Twitter, with many users sharing updates on the storm's progress while others hoped it wouldn't come their way.

The storm slashed directly across Puerto Rico, tearing up trees and knocking out power to more than a million people. It then headed out to sea, north of the Dominican Republic, where the powerful storm's outer bands were buffeting the north coast with dangerous sea surge and downpours. President Barack Obama declared an emergency for Puerto Rico, making it eligible for federal help.

Irene was forecast to pass over or near the Turks and Caicos Islands and the southeastern Bahamas by Tuesday night and be near the central Bahamas early Wednesday.

In the U.K. territory of the Turks and Caicos, a steady stream of customers bought plywood and nails at hardware stores, while others readied storm shutters and emergency kits at home.

"I can tell you I don't want this storm to come. It looks like it could get bad, so I've definitely got to get my boats out of the water," said Dedrick Handfield at the North Caicos hardware store where he works.

Many of the center's computer models had the storm veering northward away from Florida's east coast toward Georgia and the Carolinas. A hurricane center forecast map said the storm's center could come ashore in one of the states on Saturday or Sunday, but forecasters said much was still unclear.

"In terms of where it's going to go, there is still a pretty high level of uncertainty," said Wallace Hogsett, a National Hurricane Center meteorologist. "It's a very difficult forecast in terms of when it's going to turn northward."

One key reason for that, he said, is the difficulty of measuring how Irene will be affected by the high terrain of the island of Hispaniola, which is shared by Haiti and the Dominican. Hurricane warnings were up on the northern side of the Dominican Republic, as well as the Turks and Caicos islands just south of the long Bahamas chain. Forecasters say it depends on which way the storm veers after passing the Bahamas Tuesday or into Wednesday and heads into the very warm Atlantic waters.

And several past hurricanes have turned into Category 4 or 5 monsters but hit land with much less force.

The other big factor is exactly when the storm will encounter a higher-level trough along the U.S. East Coast, which will eventually turn it to the north.

"Timing is everything," Hogsett said.

In South Carolina, emergency agencies went on alert for what could be the first hurricane to hit there in seven years.

"This is potentially a very serious hurricane," longtime Charleston Mayor Joseph P. Riley Jr. said. He led Charleston's recovery from the massive destruction of Hurricane Hugo's 135 mph winds and waves back in 1989.

Joe Farmer of the state Emergency Management Division said he's not worried about complacency.

"If it does move this way, there will be a lot of public notice given and people will be warned," he said.

It's been more than a century since Georgia has taken a direct hit from a Category 3 storm or greater. That was in 1893 and the last hurricane to make landfall along the state's 100-mile coast was David, which caused only minor damage when it struck in 1979.

Across Florida, emergency management agencies were closely monitoring Irene's movements and track. They urged residents to make sure they have batteries, drinking water, food and other supplies available in case Irene takes aim at the state.

"We must prepare for the worst and hope for the best," said Joe Martinez, chairman of the Miami-Dade County Commission.

Gov. Scott met with state emergency management officials and the state meteorologist, poring over detailed charts involving windspeed and steering currents. Scott, a first-term Republican who has not experienced a hurricane as governor, asked questions such as how much advanced notice would be needed for evacuations of low-lying areas.

"Irene's going to be close," Amy Godsey, the state meteorologist, told Scott. "We're not out of the woods yet."

Scott replied, "I'm an optimist."