UPDATE @ 12:05 PM from Joe: Irene is battering the North Carolina coast right now. The is a very big storm that will be wreaking havoc up the East Coast over the next couple days: lots of rain, intense wind, storm surges, tornadoes. Irene has it all. The Weather Channel reports it will be a hurricane all the way up the coast.
Pam Spaulding posted a video from her home in Durham. The first bands from the storm have hit the DC area. We'll be getting the winds later today. As of noon, all mass transit in NYC transit is now shut down.
Here's the track, via the National Hurricane Center, as of 11 AM ET. Red lines indicate hurricane warnings. The blue is for tropical storm warnings. You can see that the storm will be hugging the coast. These storms draw strength from the warm water, so it's got an energy source:
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Amazing. Irene is due to hit the coast of North Carolina around 8AM today but more updates during the day.
New York City officials issued what they called an unprecedented order on Friday for the evacuation of about 370,000 residents of low-lying areas at the city’s edges — from the expensive apartments in Battery Park City to the roller coaster in Coney Island to the dilapidated boardwalk in the Rockaways — warning that Hurricane Irene was such a threat that people living there simply had to get out.
Officials made what they said was another first-of-its-kind decision, announcing plans to shut down the city’s entire transit system Saturday — all 468 subway stations and 840 miles of tracks, and the rest of the nation’s largest mass transit network: thousands of buses in the city, as well as the buses and commuter trains that reach from Midtown Manhattan to the suburbs.
Underscoring what Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and other officials said was the seriousness of the threat, President Obama approved a request from Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York to declare a federal emergency in the state while the hurricane was still several hundred miles away, churning toward the Carolinas. The city was part of a hurricane warning that took in hundreds of miles of coastline, from Sandy Hook, N.J., to Sagamore Beach, Mass.
