When is irene reaching nyc

So were LaGuardia and Newark airports. So was Grand Central Terminal, where the great hall was cleared out entirely. Wind and rain were expected to diminish by afternoon. The flooding in lower Manhattan was dangerously close to Wall Street, and while the New York Stock Exchange can run on generator power, it was unclear how many traders would show up for work Monday. Throughout the East Coast storm zone, the total extent of damage was unclear, but officials and in parts of the storm zone were relieved to find their communities with relatively minor problems.

Forecasters said the storm remained capable of causing ruinous flooding with a combination of storm surge, high tides and 6 to 12 inches of rain. They need to get inside and stay in a safe place until this thing is over. Irene caused flooding from North Carolina to Delaware, both from the 7-foot waves it pushed into the coast and from heavy rain. Eastern North Carolina got 10 to 14 inches of rain. Virginia's Hampton Roads area was drenched with at least 9 inches, 16 in some spots.

More than 1 million homes and businesses lost power in Virginia alone, where three people were killed by falling trees and about roads were closed. Emergency crews around the region prepared to head out at daybreak to assess the damage, though with some roads impassable and rivers still rising, it could take days.

However, it certainly could have turned out worse for the Hampton Roads area," said National Weather Service meteorologist Mike Montefusco. In Virginia Beach, the city posted on Twitter late Saturday that initial reports were promising, with the resort area suffering minimal damage. Ocean City, Md. No reports of major damage! Charlie Koetzle was up at 4 a. Asked about damage, he mentioned a sign that blew down.

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.

At least 2. CBC weather specialist Jay Scotland, who is tracking Irene, said the storm has been weakening as it's been drawing in dry air from the west, but that the hurricane is now moving back over water. The hurricane's outer reaches stretch from the Carolinas to Cape Co, Mass.

A North Carolina man was struck by a flying tree limb, someone in Virginia was killed when a tree fell on a car, and an year-old boy in Virginia died when a tree crashed through his apartment building. I just hate hurricanes.

That made it a Category 1, the least threatening on a one-to-five scale, and barely stronger than a tropical storm. 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 , 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. Defence Secretary Leon Panetta told 6, 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 centre in Washington to offer moral support.

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 was expected to take as long as eight hours for all the trains to complete their runs and be taken out of service. The transportation commissioner said that if windspeeds reached over 50 mph, they would have to evacuate Rockaway; we didn't want people to be cut off.

Again, the lesson learned from Katrina loomed over Manhattan. Storm surges could be a huge danger, felling bridges or levees , and there was no choice but to prepare for the worst. People were forced to evacuate. As civil engineer Simonovic explained, the hardest part of preparing for any disaster is often the human factor.

This is especially true when you're dealing with a population the size of New York City's, where there is almost no living memory of having dealt with hurricane and flood disasters before.

In a study published in , residents of New York City were interviewed to gauge their responses to questions concerning hurricane evacuation. The report explains:. The population has too little experience responding to hurricane threats to have developed a response culture. There are no relatively recent hurricane evacuations in the city to learn from. Experience is something that affects how people respond to disasters.

If I lived through a disaster then I can measure against something. I know what that [hurricane] wind potentially could mean. These fine psychological factors affect response.

I don't think too many people in New York have experience with flooding. This is a new type of situation for them, and this may lead to misjudgment in what's the right way to respond.

By contrast, he noted, people in Japan have a national disaster prevention day every year on September 1. That day, the entire nation — from the Prime Minister to schoolchildren — goes through a disaster drill, practicing for when the next storm or earthquake will hit.

Everyone in Japan knows where to go if there's a flood or quake, and where to wait for help. And yet most New Yorkers don't even know where the evacuation zones in their city are, let alone where to go in an emergency.

The report states:. The biggest obstruction to having an efficacious evacuation response in New York is lack of familiarity with the evacuation zones, their boundaries, and the rationale behind them. Among people who said they knew whether they lived in an area needing to evacuate, the great majority were unable to correctly identify which zone they lived in.

It's worth mentioning that the NYC hurricane evacuation study acknowledges mass evacuation is far from the best answer; it's a last resort, and city officials will evacuate as few people as possible over as much time as preparation will allow. Emergency officials gain nothing from over-evacuating — the city becomes congested, and the truly endangered areas may not get enough resources to cope with the disaster. Given that most New Yorkers had almost no idea how to cope with a major hurricane until last weekend, the city came through pretty well.

More than , people were told to be out by 5 p. By late Saturday, Bloomberg said the edge of Hurricane Irene had reached the city and it was no longer safe to be outside. Many New Yorkers took the evacuation in stride, staying off the streets and hunkering down. Some planned hurricane get-togethers and hot tub parties. Sandbags and tarps were placed on or around subway grates. People arrived in a trickle at a shelter set up at a high school in the Park Slope section of Brooklyn. Some carried garbage bags filled with clothing; others pushed carts loaded with their belongings.

Tenants said management got them to leave by telling them the water and power would be shut off at 5 p. In Times Square, shops boarded up windows and sandbags were stacked outside of stores.

The street performer known as the Naked Cowboy, who stands at the Crossroads of the World wearing only underwear and a guitar, had a life vest on.