Irene Blamed for At Least 9 Deaths as Storm Moves Northeast

By late Saturday, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg said the edge of Hurricane Irene had reached the city and it was no longer safe to be outside.

“The time for evacuation is over. Everyone should now go inside and stay inside,” he said. 

Along the rest of the mid-Atlantic coast, Hurricane Irene pounded the North Carolina and Virginia coasts with fierce winds and heavy rain Saturday, killing at least nine people, including two children, and leaving nearly two million people without power as it began a ferocious run up the East Coast.

In North Carolina, a man was crushed to death outside his home by a large limb blown down during high winds from the hurricane and a child died in a wreck after the car she was in crashed at an intersection where the storm had knocked out power to the traffic lights. Two other deaths in North Carolina were also reported, according to the state’s Office of Emergency Management.  

In Maryland, an emergency official says one person has reportedly died after a tree fell on a house in Queen Anne’s County. 

Authorities in Maryland warned of a potential dam failure, Reuters reported.

“Due to the extreme rain event caused by Hurricane Irene, a notification is being issued for a potential Dam Failure situation that may cause significant flooding that could threaten people, homes and roads downstream from the St. Mary’s Lake Dam,” the St. Mary’s County Government website said.

Heavy winds continued to lash the Hampton Roads region of Virginia on Saturday night as Irene maintained its north-northeast path.

In New York, authorities began the Herculean job of bringing the city to a halt. The subway began shutting down at noon, the first time the system was closed because of a natural disaster. It is unclear when the system will run again.

On Wall Street, sandbags were placed around subway grates near the East River because of fear of flooding. Tarps were placed over other grates. Construction stopped throughout the city, and workers at the site of the World Trade Center dismantled a crane and secured equipment.

While there were plenty of cabs on the street, the city was far quieter than on an average Saturday. In some of the busiest parts of Manhattan, it was possible to cross a major avenue without looking, and the waters of New York Harbor, which might normally be churning from boat traffic, were quiet before the storm. The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey closed the Palisades Interstate Parkway entrance to the George Washington Bridge due to weather conditions.

The biggest utility, Consolidated Edison, considered cutting off power to 6,500 customers in lower Manhattan because it would make the eventual repairs easier. Mayor Michael Bloomberg also warned New Yorkers that elevators in public housing would be shut down, and elevators in some high-rises would quit working so people don’t get trapped if the power goes out.

A day earlier, the city ordered evacuations for low-lying areas, including Battery Park City at the southern edge of Manhattan, Coney Island with its famous amusement park and the beachfront Rockaways in Queens.

The five main New York-area airports — La Guardia, John F. Kennedy and Newark, plus two smaller ones — waved in their last arriving flights around noon. The Giants and Jets postponed their preseason NFL game, the Mets postponed two baseball games, and Broadway theaters were dark.

New York has seen only a handful of hurricanes in the past 200 years. The Northeast is much more used to snowstorms — including the blizzard last December, when Bloomberg was criticized for a slow response.

The violent Category 1 hurricane slammed into Cape Lookout, N.C., at about 7:30 a.m., packing maximum sustained winds at around 85 mph, according to the National Hurricane Center in Miami. Forecasters say Irene’s sustained winds have eased a bit but are still at hurricane strength as the bulk of the powerful storm starts to re-emerge over the warm waters of the Atlantic Ocean.

With most of its transportation machinery shut down, the Eastern Seaboard spent the day nervously watching the storm’s march across a swath of the nation inhabited by 65 million people. The hurricane had an enormous wingspan — 500 miles, its outer reaches stretching from the Carolinas to Cape Cod — and packed wind gusts of 115 mph.

The hurricane stirred up 7-foot waves, and forecasters warned of storm-surge danger on the coasts of Virginia and Delaware, along the Jersey Shore and in New York Harbor and Long Island Sound. In Maryland, authorities closed the Chesapeake Bay bridge Saturday night as Irene gusts reached 72 to 80 mph. 

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Irene made its official landfall just after first light near Cape Lookout, N.C., at the southern end of the Outer Banks, the ribbon of land that bows out into the Atlantic Ocean. Shorefront hotels and houses were lashed with waves. Two piers were destroyed, and at least one hospital was forced to run on generator power.

“Things are banging against the house,” Leon Reasor said as he rode out the storm in the town of Buxton. “I hope it doesn’t get worse, but I know it will. I just hate hurricanes.”

By afternoon, the storm had weakened to sustained winds of 80 mph, down from 100 mph on Friday. That made it a Category 1, the least threatening on a 1-to-5 scale, and barely stronger than a tropical storm. Its center was positioned almost exactly where North Carolina meets Virginia at the Atlantic, and it was moving more slowly, at 13 mph, and back out toward the ocean.

After the Outer Banks, the storm strafed Virginia with rain and strong wind. It covered the Hampton Roads region, which is thick with inlets and rivers and floods easily, and chugged north toward Chesapeake Bay. Shaped like a massive inverted comma, the storm had a thick northern flank that covered all of Delaware, almost all of Maryland and the eastern half of Virginia.

It was the first hurricane to make landfall in the continental United States since 2008, and came almost six years to the day after Katrina ravaged New Orleans. Experts guessed that no other hurricane in American history had threatened as many people.

At least 2.3 million were under orders to move to somewhere safer, although it was unclear how many obeyed or, in some cases, how they could.

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta told 6,500 troops from all branches of the military to get ready to pitch in on relief work, and President Barack Obama visited the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s command center in Washington and offered moral support.

“It’s going to be a long 72 hours,” he said, “and obviously a lot of families are going to be affected.”

“Isabel got 10 inches from coming in the house, and this one ain’t no Isabel,” said Chuck Owen of Poquoson, Va., who has never abandoned his house to heed an evacuation order. He was referring to Hurricane Isabel, which chugged through in 2003.

Still, Owen put his pickup truck on a small pyramid of cinder blocks to protect it from the storm tide, which had already begun surging through the saltwater marshes that stand between Poquoson and Chesapeake Bay.

Airlines said 9,000 flights were canceled, including 3,000 on Saturday. Airlines declined to say how many passengers would be affected, but it could easily be millions because so many flights make connections on the East Coast. There were more than 10,000 cancellations during the blizzard last winter.

American Airlines spokeswoman Andrea Huguely said it was not clear when flights would resume out of New York.

“The one thing about a hurricane is that you can prepare for it and you just have to adapt your plan based on how the storm travels,” she said. “It’s basically an educated guessing game.”

Greyhound suspended bus service between Richmond, Va., and Boston. Amtrak canceled trains in the Northeast for Sunday.

The power losses covered 900,000 homes and businesses and were heavily concentrated in Virginia and North Carolina. Dominion Resources reported almost 600,000 customers without power and Progress Energy 260,000, with much of the outages in Wilmington and Wrightsville Beach, N.C.

Irene roared across the Caribbean earlier this week, offering a devastating preview for the United States: power outages, dangerous floods and high winds that caused millions of dollars in damage