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Showing posts with label Irene. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Irene. Show all posts
Friday, August 26, 2011
Evacuations begin on tiny NC island ahead of Irene
HATTERAS, N.C. (AP) — Evacuations began on a tiny barrier island off North Carolina as Hurricane Irene strengthened to a major Category 3 storm over the Bahamas on Wednesday with the East Coast in its sights.
Irene's maximum sustained winds increased to near 115 mph (185 kph) with additional strengthening forecast, the U.S. National Hurricane Center in Miami said.
The evacuation in North Carolina was a test of whether people in the crosshairs of the first major hurricane along the East Coast in years would heed orders to get out of the way.
The first ferry to leave Ocracoke Island arrived just before 5:30 a.m. in nearby Hatteras with around a dozen cars on board.
It won't be easy to get thousands of people off Ocracoke Island, which is accessible only by boat. The 16-mile-long barrier island is home to about 800 year-round residents and a tourist population that swells into the thousands when vacationers rent rooms and cottages. Tourists were told to evacuate Wednesday. Island residents were told to get out on Thursday.
It wasn't clear how many people on the first arriving ferry Wednesday morning were tourists, but the first two cars to drive off it had New York and New Jersey plates.
Getting off the next ferry about an hour later was a family that included newlywed Jennifer Baharek, 23, of Torrington, Conn. She and her husband, Andrew, were married Monday and planned to spend their honeymoon on the island.
"We just got to spend one day on the beach and then we went to bed early to get up for the evacuation," she said.
State workers questioned people who tried taking the ferry to the island turned a few cars around. In addition to the ferry line to Hatteras, there were two other ferry lines that went to and from the island.
Federal officials have warned Irene could cause flooding, power outages or worse all along the East Coast as far north as Maine, even if it stays offshore. The projected path has gradually shifted to the east, and Irene could make landfall anywhere from South Carolina to Massachusetts over the weekend.
Speaking Wednesday on ABC's "Good Morning America," Craig Fugate, head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, said people as far north as New England should be ready for the storm. When asked about concerns preparing the Northeast for a hurricane, which is uncommon in that part of the country, Fugate cited Tuesday's earthquake that rattled the East Coast.
"It's a reminder that we don't always get to pick the next disaster," Fugate said.
In North Carolina, the state-run ferry service off Ocracoke Island would be free during the evacuation, but no reservations were allowed. Boats can carry no more than 50 vehicles at a time.
The island is part of North Carolina's Outer Banks, a roughly 200-mile stretch of fragile barrier islands off the state's coast. Pristine beaches and wild mustangs attract thousands of tourists each year. Aside from Ocracoke, the other islands are accessible by bridges to the mainland and ferries. The limited access can make the evacuation particularly tense.
All the barrier islands have the geographic weakness of jutting out into the Atlantic like the side-view mirror of a car, a location that's frequently been in the path of destructive storms over the decades.
Many remember 1999's Hurricane Floyd, which made landfall as a Category 2 and caused a storm surge that wiped out scores of houses and other properties on the Outer Banks.
As of 11 a.m. EDT Wednesday, Irene was centered about 285 miles (460 kilometers) southeast of Nassau in the Bahamas and was moving northwest near 12 mph (19 kph).
It had already wrought destruction across the Caribbean, giving a glimpse of what the storm might bring to the Eastern Seaboard. In Puerto Rico, tens of thousands were without power, and one woman died after trying to cross a swollen river in her car. At least hundreds were displaced by flooding in the Dominican Republic, forced to take refuge in schools and churches.
Forecasters warned it could get worse: The storm could strengthen in the next day or so. Irene could crawl up the coast Sunday toward the Northeast region, where residents aren't accustomed to such storms.
It's been more than seven years since a major hurricane, considered a Category 3 with winds of at least 111 mph (179 kph), hit the East Coast. Hurricane Jeanne came ashore on Florida's east coast in 2004.
On North Carolina's mainland, residents who have weathered years of storms took notice. People flocked to gas stations and stores Tuesday to stock up on supplies like gasoline for generators, plywood for boarding up windows, flashlights, batteries and drinking water.
In the coastal city of Wilmington, Tommy Early watched Tuesday as customers came in to his Shell service station to prepare. Irene was the main topic of conversation there.
The last hurricane to hit the U.S. was Ike in 2008. The last Category 3 or higher to hit the Carolinas was Bonnie in 1998, but caused less damage than other memorable hurricanes: Hugo in 1989, Floyd in 1999 and Isabel in 2003.
Though a Category 2, Isabel cut a new inlet through Hatteras Island and killed 33 people.
At Craft American Hardware at Wrightsville Beach, Don Korman said he had placed a big order set to arrive Wednesday: Batteries, lanterns, tarps and shutter supplies.
"People are watching the TV, but they usually come by a few days before," he said. "If it looks like it's coming like this, you can run out of stock really quick."
Korman, though, plans to be ready even for 11th-hour supply trips: the store is ready to plywood its windows and run off generator power until it becomes unsafe or unwise to keep the doors open.
"We won't close until the last minute," he said.
Most locals were heeding the warnings and getting ready for the storm, though few seemed panicked.
"Water, batteries, flashlights and now I'm going to get my grocery shopping done," said Sally Godwin, carrying two large jugs of fresh water out of Korman's store with her. "I live at the beach, and they always evacuate it the day before. I have to make sure all my little stuff's taken care of."
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Associated Press writers Tom Breen in Wilmington, N.C., and Michael Biesecker in Raleigh, N.C., contributed to this report.
Thursday, August 25, 2011
Hurricane Irene affirms 'magic' hurricane date
Hurricane watchers circle Aug. 20 on their calendars every year. This is the "magic" date when hurricane season seems to kicks into high gear.
Like clockwork, Hurricane Irene — the Atlantic's first hurricane of 2011 — was born on Aug. 22, later strengthening to a Category 2 hurricane. Last year was another good example of an active storm season ramping up after Aug. 20. All of the 2010's major hurricanes (those of Category 3 or higher) formed after Aug. 20, starting with Danielle on Aug. 21.
Aug. 20 seems to be special because around this time, the air and ocean are in just the right state to foster and feed the monster storms. In climate-speak, this time of year is when vertical shear (a change in wind directions with height) in the atmosphere is low enough and sea surface temperatures are warm enough to create big storms.
Irene could be "big threat" to Northeast
NASSAU (Reuters) - Powerful Hurricane Irene battered the Bahamas on Wednesday on a track to the North Carolina coast that forecasters say could threaten the densely populated U.S. Northeast, including New York, starting on Sunday.
Irene, a major Category 3 storm with winds of 120 miles per hour, was pounding southeast Bahamian islands with winds, rain and dangerous storm surge. Tourists fled the storm and major cruise lines canceled Bahamas stops for coming days.
The first hurricane of the storm-filled 2011 Atlantic season is expected to gather power after it leaves the Bahamas on Thursday and race across open warm waters to clip North Carolina's jutting Outer Banks region on Saturday afternoon.
After that, forecasters see it hugging the U.S. eastern seaboard, swirling rains and winds across several hundred miles (km) as it churns northward toward New England. The forecast track indicates Florida and Georgia will be spared.
"The exact center of the storm may actually stay pretty close to the coastline during the day on Saturday and then become a big threat for New England and perhaps Long Island toward 96 to 100 hours out on Sunday," National Hurricane Center Director Bill Read said.
"Be advised, it's going to be a very large circulation as it moves north of the Carolinas," he told a conference call.
Read said North Carolina could experience tropical storm force winds as early as Saturday morning.DANGEROUSLY WIDE HURRICANE
At 5 p.m. EDT (2100 GMT), Irene's center was about 215 miles southeast of Nassau, capital of the Bahamas.
If Irene makes a direct landfall in the continental United States, it will be the first hurricane to hit there since Ike pounded Texas in 2008. But forecasts showed it posing no threat to U.S. oil and gas installations in the Gulf of Mexico.
Irene's torrential rains were blamed for two deaths in the northeast Caribbean islands. A woman in Puerto Rico and a Haitian man in the Dominican Republic were swept away by floodwaters from overflowing rivers.
States from the Carolinas northward were on alert and evacuations were already under way in Ocracoke, the most exposed of North Carolina's Outer Banks barrier islands.
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo ordered the state's Office of Emergency Management to prepare for possible impact from Irene. Cuomo said coastal zones were most at risk, although inland areas could get hit by heavy rainfall and strong winds.
Insurers kept a nervous watch in case Irene threatened wealthy enclaves such as the Hamptons, an eastern Long Island playground for New York's rich.
Forecasters have warned that even if the center of the hurricane stays offshore as it tracks up the mid-Atlantic coast from the weekend, its wide, swirling bands could lash cities including Washington and New York with winds and rain, knock out power, trigger coastal storm surges and cause flooding.
"We're not paying attention just to the eye of the storm. We're looking at how wide it is, how large it is," Virginia Emergency Management Department spokesperson Laura Southard said, advising residents to prepare.
"STOCKING UP LIKE CRAZY"
Earlier on Wednesday, Irene strengthened over the Bahamas to a major Category 3 hurricane on the five-step Saffir-Simpson intensity scale, posing a high risk of injury and death. The NHC said it could become a Category 4 by Thursday.
"Someone's roof is in my front yard," Harvey Roberts, an assistant administrator on the sparsely populated southeast Bahamas island of Mayaguana told reporters on Wednesday, saying "tremendous winds" were lashing homes and buildings there.
Farther north on the scattered low-lying Bahamas, including Nassau, residents were frantically preparing.
"Everyone is either pulling up boats or putting up shutters. We are very well prepared," said Chuck Pinder, a 28-year-old fisherman in the community of Spanish Wells.
NHC chief Read predicted a "really tough time" for the Bahamas as Irene swept through over the next 24-36 hours.
Royal Caribbean and Carnival were among major international cruise lines that rearranged itineraries for more than a dozen ships in the area.
Energy firms planned to shut more than 28 million barrels of oil storage capacity in the Bahamas and refineries on the U.S. East Coast were preparing for the storm.
On the U.S. mainland, across the Carolinas coastline and in neighboring Virginia, residents stocked up with food, water and other supplies, including plywood to board up windows.
Sam's Club at Chesapeake Square, a members-only discount warehouse, reported a run on batteries, water and generators. "There are people stocking up like crazy -- we're out of generators," said Tracy Hatfield at the warehouse.
(Additional reporting by Tom Brown, Jane Sutton and Manuel Rueda in Miami, Manuel Jimenez in Santo Domingo, Matthew Ward in Chesapeake, Virginia; Joan Gralla in New York, Lisa Lambert in Washington; Ned Barnett in Raleigh, N.C.; Writing by Pascal Fletcher; Editing by Sandra Maler)
To stay or go? Officials ponder Irene evacuations
HATTERAS, N.C. (AP) — Hurricane Irene could hit anywhere from North Carolina to New York this weekend, leaving officials in the path of uncertainty to make a delicate decision. Should they tell tourists to leave during one of the last weeks of the multibillion-dollar summer season?
Most were in a wait-and-see mode, holding out to get every dime before the storm's path crystalizes. North Carolina's governor told reporters not to scare people away.
"You will never endanger your tourists, but you also don't want to over inflate the sense of urgency about the storm. And so let's just hang on," North Carolina Gov. Beverly Perdue said Wednesday. At the same time she warned to "prepare for the worst."
In the Bahamas, tourists cut their vacations short and caught the last flights out before the airport was closed. Those who remained behind with locals prepared for a rough night of violent winds and a dangerous storm surge that threatened to punish the low-lying chain of islands. Irene has already hit Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic, causing landslides and flooding homes. One woman was killed.
On the Outer Banks of North Carolina, some tourists heeded evacuation orders for a tiny barrier island as Irene strengthened to a Category 3 storm, with winds of 120 mph (193 kph).
"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 stays offshore. Hurricane-force winds were expected 50 miles from the center of the storm.
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. Forecasters are still about a day away from the cone reaching the East Coast. A system currently over the Great Lakes will play a large role in determining if Irene is pushed farther to the east in the next three or four days.
The mood was calm in Virginia Beach, Va. Jimmy Capps, manager of the Breakers Resort Inn, said the 56-room hotel is about 80 percent booked for the weekend, despite a few cancellations.
"It just appears they're not quite sure what the storm is going to do," Capps said. "The thing I'm amazed at now is that we haven't had more cancellations so far. Usually when they start mentioning the Outer Banks and Cape Lookout, which we are between, the phones light up."
In New England, some beachgoers started second-guessing vacation plans. Steven Miller, who runs a charter sport fishing company off the coast of Rhode Island, hasn't received any cancellations, but no one has been calling to schedule trips in the next few days, either.
"The hoopla beforehand could end the season," Miller said. "Everybody yanks their boats out, everybody leaves, and then they don't come back because it's so late in the season."
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 also 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 that event.
"Tourism depends so much on the weather, which is such an unpredictable element," said Samantha Rich, a tourism extension specialist at North Carolina State University. "An extremely hot season, an extremely cold season, a hurricane — it can make or break a season, especially for small businesses."
In North Carolina's Outer Banks, where about 300,000 visitors come every week in the summer, tourism is the lifeblood of the towns that dot the sandy barrier islands. Dare County beaches are the state's top vacation destination. Tourism represents about $834 million for businesses in the county, which has 8,000 rental homes and 3,000 hotel rooms, plus campground spots.
Business owners are wary of sacrificing a weekend in August if it's not completely necessary.
"We had that occur last year, with Earl," said Veda Peters, co-owner of the Cypress House Inn in Kill Devil Hills. He was referring to the hurricane that passed off to the east, bringing little more than a night of rain and some wind gusts. "They evacuated the county, and then Labor Day weekend was gorgeous in the Outer Banks."
So far, the Cypress House Inn is fully booked for the coming weekend, but Peters already is getting calls about the weather.
"If it's safe for people to be here, we want them to be here. If it's not safe, we'll say so and we'll get you in as soon as it is," said Lee Nettles, managing director or the Outer Banks Visitors Bureau. "We have a peak summer season and we're in the midst of that."
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Associated Press writers Tom Breen, Emery Dalesio, Gary D. Robertson and Michael Biesecker in Raleigh; Larry O'Dell in Richmond, Va.; David Klepper in Providence, R.I.; and Ben Fox in Nassau, Bahamas, contributed to this report.
Threat of Irene exposes New York's vulnerability
NEW YORK (Reuters) - In the annals of natural disasters, it doesn't get much worse than a major hurricane directly striking New York City and Long Island.
Hurricane Irene is on a course that will take it up the East Coast from the weekend. While there is still uncertainty about where it will hit and when, the forecast models increasingly suggest some parts of the greater New York area will face some type of storm or hurricane impact.
According to New York City's Office of Emergency Management, the last hurricane to pass directly over the city was in 1821 -- and it caused tides to rise 13 feet in one hour, flooding all of lower Manhattan to Canal St.
But for Long Island, the threat is much worse. People still talk about the Long Island Express of 1938, a Category 3 storm that the U.S. government has said would cause $40 billion in damage if it hit today.
Meteorologists say the risk appears most acute for areas like the Hamptons, an eastern Long Island playground for New York's rich.
"If the storm followed the exact track of it, there could be considerable wind damage and tidal flooding out in those areas," said James Aman, senior meteorologist with WeatherBug. "There potentially could be some storm surge problems out around the eastern tip of Long Island, Rhode Island, Cape Cod, some of the areas around Boston that face Massachusetts Bay."
Estimating the damage such an impact would cause is difficult without knowing the storm's parameters, like wind speed, rainfall totals, direction and the like. Some are already taking a ballpark guess, though.
"If Irene hits Long Island or southeast Massachusetts, the storm has the potential to be a $10 billion disaster," Weather Underground's Jeff Masters said in a blog post Wednesday.
If Masters is right, that would make the insured losses from Irene some of the worst in history, at a time that insurers are already stretched by record-breaking natural disasters around the world.
DAMAGING THE RICH
High net worth insurers like AIG and Chubb are big players in those kinds of upper-class regions, where insured losses can total up quickly due to high property values as well as extensive collections of art and jewelry.
They are scrambling now to warn their customers to be prepared, to take the kinds of precautions that people in places like Florida take for granted.
"Without the repetition of events like the folks in Florida benefit from, that preparedness is not front and center," said Michael Taylor, executive vice president for claims in the consumer unit at Chartis, the property insurance arm of AIG.
Taylor said Chartis has been in touch with its brokers, asking them to contact customers and remind them of hurricane preparedness tips that they already receive yearly but might otherwise disregard.
There is only so much preparedness can do, though. Taylor said even the homes of the wealthy sometimes don't feature things like hurricane-strength glass and wind shutters, which are standard in parts of Florida but less common in the northeast.
"These are things that will make homes a little more susceptible here, if we do have high winds," he added.
Those winds could be a problem for New York City in particular, a number of experts say.
Florida State University has created an online map that shows the track of 14 different models, two of which show the Irene plowing straight through New Jersey and putting New York City, Newark and other areas on the wrong side of the storm.
Given how compact Manhattan is, even tropical storm-force conditions could do serious damage.
"The water's got to go somewhere and the wind is going to hit something," said Lou Gritzo, research manager at insurer FM Global. "New York City becomes a wind tunnel when the wind whips between the buildings, so that's going to be a force that intensifies how projectiles are moving."
$100 BILLION DISASTER
In fact, ask any scientist who models catastrophes for a living what it would take to create a $100 billion natural disaster, and their list will almost always include a major hurricane (Category 3 or higher) hitting New York City.
"We haven't had a storm in this area for quite some time and it's difficult to say how tested some of these buildings are against hurricane force winds," said Matt Nielsen, product manager for the U.S. hurricane model at catastrophe modeling company RMS.
The city's emergency management office featured Irene front and center on its website Wednesday, urging people to know whether they were in a designated hurricane risk zone and to know the proper evacuation routes out of the city.
Even if Irene passes far enough away from the city and the New York region to spare a full-force impact, flooding can still be a significant problem, especially with tides expected to be high anyway over the weekend due to a new moon.
Four of the six most significant flood events of the last 30 years, based on the amount paid out by the National Flood Insurance Program in claims, included the New York region -- Hurricane Ivan in 2004, Hurricane Isabel in 2003, Tropical Storm Allison in 2001 and Hurricane Floyd in 1999.
Paid claims from those four storms, just for flooding, topped $3.5 billion, according to data compiled by the Insurance Information Institute.
(Editing by Steve Orlofsky)
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