City Orders Evacuation of Coastal Areas
今天继续带来关于飓风Irene的报道，首先是New York Times:New York City officials issued what they called an unprecedented order on Friday for the evacuation of about 250,000 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 on Saturday — all 468 subway stations and 840 miles of tracks, and the rest of 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.
The hurricane, 290 miles of fury dancing angrily across the Atlantic Ocean toward the coast, was actually advancing more slowly than most late-summer storms, the National Weather Service said. It said that by doing a minuet instead of a faster step, the storm would prolong the pounding it delivered to coastal areas — when it finally reached them.
“You only have to look at the weather maps to understand how big this storm is and how unique it is,” Mr. Bloomberg said at a news conference on Friday at City Hall, “and it’s heading basically for us.”
The increasingly ominous announcements from officials — and the wall-to-wall coverage — sent New Yorkers hurrying to buy staples like canned food and candles. “Is this the apocalypse supply line?” a man asked as he stood in a line that stretched outside a hardware store on First Avenue, waiting to buy batteries.
Shoppers in some places found that the shelves had been cleaned out. In shore towns in New Jersey and on Long Island, vacationers waited in lines at gasoline stations and watched as bulldozers built berms on low-lying beach roads.
In Point Lookout on Long Island, as in Point Pleasant Beach in New Jersey, homeowners covered windows with plywood, and boaters struggled to get their vessels away from docks. There were lines at the ramps at marinas as boats were pulled from the water and hitched on trailers, one at a time.
In the city — from high rises in Manhattan to smaller buildings in Queens and Brooklyn — apartment dwellers with balconies and terraces hauled in their patio furniture and their potted plants. The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s New York field office, with more than 1,000 agents in two buildings in Lower Manhattan, told employees by e-mail that they should put files in drawers for the weekend rather than leave them lying on their desks, apparently out of concern that paperwork would go flying if the storm broke the windows.
The announcement about the transit shutdown and the evacuation of what the city called Zone A low-lying areas prompted a cascade of cancellations for Saturday and Sunday: Broadway shows, the Mets’ games against the Atlanta Braves at Citi Field, the performances by the Dave Matthews Band on Governors Island and the outdoor showing of opera movies at Lincoln Center, among many others. Even the Bronx Zoo, the Central Park Zoo, the Prospect Park Zoo and the New York Aquarium closed for the weekend.
One of the three major airports in the region, Kennedy International, said it would close to international arrivals at noon on Saturday.
Some Atlantic City casinos made plans to stop rolling the dice and turn off the slot machines by 8 p.m. Friday. The naval submarine base in Groton, Conn., sent four submarines out to ride out the storm deep in the Atlantic Ocean.
And Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey said that all lanes of a 28-mile stretch of a major highway in Ocean County would go in only one direction — westward — beginning at 6 p.m. on Friday to help speed the trip away from Long Beach Island, which is connected to the mainland by only a single bridge. He said he was also considering reversing traffic on a section of the Garden State Parkway to get drivers away from the shore faster.
But some beachgoers were staying. Some were surfers who wanted to catch a last wave. Mr. Christie, for his part, sounded annoyed that they had not followed his instructions when he said at a late-afternoon briefing that he had seen television coverage of “people sitting on the beach in Asbury Park.”
“Get the hell off the beach in Asbury Park and get out — you’re done,” he said. “You’ve maximized your tan. Get off the beach. Get in your cars, and get out of those areas. You know, it amazes me that you have responsible elected officials from North Carolina north through Massachusetts, along with National Weather Service folks, telling you this is going to be an enormous storm and something for New Jersey that we haven’t seen in over 60 years. Do not waste any more time working on your tan.”
Officials said the subway shutdown was prompted mainly by wind estimates that suggested the hurricane could rock subway cars in places where they run above ground. The commuter rail lines that serve Long Island, Westchester County and Connecticut will also be shut down, as will New Jersey Transit operations. New Jersey Transit will suspend train service at noon Saturday and will stop bus service six hours later.
Mr. Cuomo said tolls on the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge and on two other bridges in low-lying Brooklyn leading to the Rockaways would be suspended to help speed the evacuation. He also said that a half dozen bridges — including the George Washington, the Robert F. Kennedy (formerly the Triborough), the Throgs Neck and the Whitestone — would be closed if winds reached 60 miles an hour for more than a short time.
Officials decided to go ahead with the Zone A evacuations, which they had first mentioned as a possibility at a City Hall briefing on Thursday, because, Mr. Bloomberg said, “Irene is now bearing down on us at a faster speed than it was.” As he stepped up the plans on Friday, the city was already evacuating hospitals and nursing homes in low-lying areas. State officials continued arrangements for coordinating emergency services and restoring electricity if the storm does the kind of damage many fear.
Mr. Bloomberg said that 91 evacuation centers and shelters opened on Friday for people who could not stay in their homes. The Nassau County executive, Edward P. Mangano, said 20 shelters would be open by the time the storm hit.
Mr. Bloomberg had said on Thursday that the city was ordering nursing homes and hospitals in those areas to evacuate residents and patients beginning at 8 a.m. Friday unless they received special permission from state and city health officials, among them the city’s health commissioner, Dr. Thomas A. Farley, who, the mayor noted, was chairman of the community health sciences department at Tulane University when [url=http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/h/hurricane_katrina/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier][color=#004276]Hurricane Katrina[/color][/url] hit New Orleans in 2005. That evacuation order covered 22 hospitals, nursing homes and other facilities for older people.
The city ordered construction work halted until 7 a.m. Monday. With the worst of the storm expected over the weekend, when relatively few construction crews would normally be on the job, the Buildings Department said Friday that its inspectors were checking construction sites to see that equipment had been secured. The department said it would check over the weekend that builders complied with the no-work order.
In Connecticut, Gov. Dannel P. Malloy said officials were preparing for “tremendous tree damage” and the loss of electricity across the entire state. “Not just for a few hours,” he added at a briefing on Friday. “Days and weeks.”
Consolidated Edison warned that it would have to cut off power to some customers if underground pipes and cables became submerged in floodwaters. To be ready for repairs, Con Ed was bringing in 800 additional workers from as far away as Texas, Mr. Olert said.
In some Zone A areas, residents seemed unsure what to do: Evacuate or not? On a checkout line in a drugstore on 47th Avenue, a couple argued about whether to stay or leave for a relative’s home in New Jersey. But some had their backpacks on and their suitcases-on-wheels rolling.
“I’m getting out of here,” said Mila Downes, 25, who was visiting her sister from England. “I expected some excitement in New York City, but not an earthquake and a hurricane on the same week.” 接着是Washington Post关于 Irene的报道：
[color=Red][b]Hurricane Irene moves up East Coast; may hit Washington area Saturday night[/b][/color]
Tens of thousands of people evacuated low-lying areas from the Carolinas to Manhattan on Friday as a vicious hurricane moved up the East Coast on a path that would carry it over eastern Virginia, Maryland and the District on Saturday night.
President Obama urged people to get out of the way of Hurricane Irene before he and his family abandoned their Martha’s Vineyard vacation to return to the White House.
“All indications point to this being a historic hurricane,” said Obama, who conferred with key response team officials and had a teleconference with East Coast governors Friday.
The storm was on a track that experts have feared for decades as they watched the rapid expansion of coastal resorts and housing developments in the lowlands behind them. They have worried that a storm tracking along the shore line, renewing its force over the warm Atlantic and then ripping with each rotation like a circular saw into coastal areas, could produce unprecedented devastation.
“It looks like the track of Irene is going to have a major impact along the East Coast starting in the Carolinas all the way up through Maine,” said Craig Fugate, director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
The storm began to bite into the Carolina coastline Friday and was expected to be over Cape Hatteras by 2 p.m. Saturday. By then, the outlying showers in its advance should be moving up through Virginia and into the Washington region.
The worst of it should pass over the area between nightfall and into Sunday morning, with the reaches between Interstate 95 and the beaches facing the most rain and highest winds.
By Sunday afternoon, if the current track holds, the storm will hit New York City. On Friday, plans were made to shut down the city’s subway system and, for the first time in memory, people were ordered to evacuate flood-prone coastal areas in Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island and the financial district in Lower Manhattan.
On Friday, as people streamed from evacuated coastal areas in North Carolina, Delaware and the Eastern Shore of Maryland and Virginia, officials in the Washington region warned that power outages might last for days after the storm blows through.
District Mayor Vincent C. Gray (D) joined governors of the adjoining states in declaring an official emergency. Virginia Gov. Robert F. McDonnell (R) sent many state employes home early Friday and Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley said, “All of us are going to be in for a long haul [Saturday] night.”
He cautioned that mobile phone service could be lost if the storm damages cell towers.
Acquiring sandbags, electrical generators, provisions and flashlights was the order of the day, and people moved double-time through stores as employees raced to restock shelves. In the District, a line of cars wrapped around the corner of New Jersey Avenue as dozens of people waited to pick up sand bags near the Navy Yard Metro station.
The weekend’s planned events were a washout, with most Saturday events canceled, as well as virtually everything on Sunday. The dedication of the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial, the D.C. Rally for Full Democracy and the National Action Network March scheduled for this weekend were called off.
Some events — like the opening of college dorms — were moved up to Friday to get ahead of the storm. Plans were made to transfer the last remaining patients at Walter Reed Army Medical Center by ambulance to the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda on Saturday morning, one day ahead of schedule.
Doctors alerted women who are due to give birth in the next week or so to have their hospital bags packed a little early. The drop in barometric pressure associated with the hurricane could cause a woman’s water to break early. Hospital officials said they are aware that lowering of atmospheric pressure tends to result in a spike in births.
“It’s along the same line as what happens when there’s a full moon,” said Matt Brock, a spokesman for Washington Hospital Center.
Pepco officials urged patience as they anticipate a “widespread” and “multi-day” power outage as Hurricane Irene approaches a region in which the company has 778,000 customers in the District and Montgomery and Prince George’s counties.
“This is a huge event,” said Joe Rigby, chief executive of Pepco’s parent company, Pepco Holdings.
Rigby said the company has 150 out-of-state workers inbound to help a beefed up staff of about 815 Pepco employees and pool of contractors that have been in the area for several months helping with tree trimming and repairs as part of a multimillion-dollar plan to improve service. By Sunday, there should be about 1,300 people working on power restoration in the Washington area, Rigby said.
Rigby and Thomas Graham, Pepco Region president, said the call centers that respond to customers can handle double the capacity of a year ago.
Dominion Virginia Power, which serves North Carolina and Virginia regions, has been tracking the hurricane for more than a week and expects Norfolk, Virginia Beach and eastern North Carolina areas to feel the greatest impact from the storm.
Baltimore Gas and Electric said Friday that central Maryland should anticipate widespread power outages lasting several days starting Saturday afternoon or evening, leaving an estimated 500,000 without power.
The Maryland Transportation Authority said the Chesapeake Bay Bridge will remain open unless sustained winds reach 55 miles per hour. Forecasts indicate winds could reach that speed as early as Saturday afternoon.
“If you are planning to cross the Bay Bridge, don’t wait until the last minute to do so,” said Maryland Transportation Secretary Beverley K. Swaim-Staley. “Certainly no later than early [Saturday] morning to make sure that you are able to cross before the weather deteriorates.”
Virginia Department of Transportation crews planned to begin emergency operations Saturday morning, working in 12-hour shifts throughout the storm. They will suspend emergency response activities in the event of sustained tropical storm winds of 39 mph or higher.
VDOT generally does not close bridges, ramps or roads unless there is high water, strong sustained winds, pavement or structural damage, or downed trees and other debris blocking roads. VDOT prepares year-round for hurricanes by training, conducting drills and performing simulation studies.
Metro chief spokesman Dan Stessel said Friday that “we do not expect above-ground rail service to be suspended unless conditions end up being worse than expected. If there are any changes, we’ll let folks know at wmata.com.”
National Cathedral officials feared the hurricane would exacerbate damage done to the
gothic church by Tuesday’s earthquake.
“If the earthquake hadn’t occurred, there wouldn’t be any issues with regard to the hurricane,” said Richard Weinberg, National Cathedral’s spokesman. “The cathedral can withstand heavy winds. But because the elements that are up there are not secure, the winds from the hurricane could cause further damage.”
Crownsville insurance agent David Mathes said that with the storm, an already busy week will get even more hectic.
“With the earthquake on Tuesday and the impending storms, we have never been so busy answering questions about what is covered and what is not,” Mathes said.
As Margaret Douglas loaded her van with enough food to last several days at Balducci’s on Old Georgetown Road in Bethesda, she said a recent $8,000 investment gave her storm confidence.
“I bought a whole house generator, that’s why,” she said. Last year, she lost the food in her refrigerator and freezer three times during separate power outages.
Patricia Capiro and Manny Fantis spent a year planning their Saturday wedding in Rehoboth Beach, where Capiro grew up. By Thursday afternoon, the linens were pressed, the flowers were ready and the cake was in the refrigerator. Then the limo company cancelled. The band’s hotel rooms were cancelled. One guest after another said they wouldn’t be able to make it.
Capiro, a news producer at NBC 4, kept calling the station’s meteorologists to ask for updates. “It just kept getting worse and worse,” said the 29 year-old bride. Finally, authorities told the couple’s venue, the Rehoboth Beach Yacht and Country Club, that it needed to shut down for the weekend.
Capiro cried and then started calling guests and vendors to tell them the wedding was off. Fantis is the executive Web producer at Channel 9, and many of their friends — colleagues at the two television stations — will spend the weekend covering the storm instead of celebrating. 最后是Chicago Tribune的：
[b][color=Red]U.S. on high alert as Hurricane Irene closes in[/color][/b]
WILMINGTON, North Carolina (Reuters) - Hurricane Irene closed in on the Atlantic coast on Friday, triggering emergency preparations that included unprecedented evacuations and mass transit shutdowns in New York City as the menacing storm approached.
As Irene careened north, rain and tropical storm force winds and ferocious surf began pummeling the North Carolina coast. "The core of the hurricane will approach the coast of North Carolina tonight and pass near or over the North Carolina coast on Saturday," the National Hurricane Center said in an advisory on Friday evening.
Washington and states from the Carolinas through Maine declared emergencies due to Irene, a nearly 600 mile-wide hurricane that put 55 million Americans on the eastern seaboard on alert and that experts say could cause billions of dollars in damages.
President Barack Obama said the impact of the storm, an unusually large storm, could be "extremely dangerous and costly" for a nation that still remembers destructive Hurricane Katrina in 2005. "All indications point to this being a historic hurricane," Obama said.
Hundreds of thousands of residents and vacationers were evacuating from Irene's path.
A quarter of a million New Yorkers were ordered to leave homes in low-lying areas, including the financial district surrounding Wall Street in Manhattan, as authorities prepared for dangerous storm surge and flooding on Sunday in the city and farther east on Long Island.
Some New York hospitals in flood-prone areas were already evacuating patients, and New York's mass transit system, which carries 8.5 million people on weekdays, was due to start shutting down around noon on Saturday.
"We've never done a mandatory evacuation before and we wouldn't be doing it now if we didn't think this storm had the potential to be very serious," Mayor Michael Bloomberg told a news conference.
As authorities ramped up preparations to cope with a potential major natural disaster on the densely populated East Coast, U.S. airlines canceled more nearly 7,000 flights and moved airplanes out of Irene's path.
Officials were taking every precaution with Irene because they remember all too well how Katrina swamped New Orleans, killing up to 1,800 people and causing $80 billion in damages.
Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said the military stood ready to aid in the response to Irene, with more than 100,000 National Guard forces available if needed in eastern states.
Coastal communities stocked up on food and water and tried to secure homes, vehicles and boats. Cities, ports, hospitals, oil refineries and nuclear plants activated emergency plans.
The earliest edges of Irene began to knock down trees, caused localized flooding and had knocked out power to 7,600 residents of Wilmington, North Carolina by Friday night.
People huddling in a shelter at a local school said they feared the storm's potential impact but were reluctant to evacuate entirely.
"We were going to go to Charlotte, but we were told we might not be able to get back if there was a lot of damage," said Chastity May, 34, as she watched over her 4-year-old son.
Some were looking to capitalize on the approaching storm.
Greg Bayly, 52, and Scott Olden, 24, were selling generators out of a rented cargo truck along a busy Wilmington street that leads out to nearby beaches. Bayly said the pair could process credit cards to complete purchases, despite the rapidly deteriorating weather conditions.
Federal and state leaders, from Obama downward, urged the millions of Americans in the hurricane's path to prepare and to heed evacuation orders if they received them.
Irene weakened early on Friday to a Category 2 hurricane from a 3 on the five-step Saffir-Simpson scale, but it was still carrying winds of up to 100 miles per hour.
It was expected to remain a hurricane as it sweeps up the mid-Atlantic coast over the weekend. The Miami-based hurricane center said it could dip below hurricane strength before reaching New England, but its impact would not vary much.
At 8 p.m. EDT, Irene's center was 235 miles south-southwest of Cape Hatteras, North Carolina and churning north-northeast.
Irene, the first hurricane of the 2011 Atlantic season, has already caused as much as $1.1 billion in insured losses in the Caribbean this week, catastrophe modeling company AIR Worldwide said, with more losses expected to come.
The hurricane center said hurricane force winds extended outward up to 90 miles from Irene's center, while tropical storm force winds extended out up to 290 miles, giving the storm a vast wind field width of nearly 600 miles.
"The wind field is huge," NHC Director Bill Read told Reuters Insider.
In earlier comments, Read said Irene, which will be the first significant hurricane to affect the populous U.S. Northeast in decades, would lash the eastern seaboard with tropical storm-force winds and a "huge swath of rain" from the Carolinas to New England.
"WATCHING THAT BIG WHITE SWIRL"
Wall Street firms scrambled to raise cash into early next week in case Irene caused major disruption in trading.
Traders were "watching that big white swirl" on their television sets, said Guy LeBas, chief fixed income strategist at Janney Montgomery Scott in Philadelphia.
Northeast oil, natural gas and power facilities also made preparations.
Brent crude oil futures rose in choppy trading on Friday as the storm approached and traders weighed comments by Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke on the economy.
Benedict Willis III, director of floor operations for investment banking boutique Sunrise Securities, said the New York Stock Exchange had a responsibility to open on Monday after the storm passes because millions of investors will be relying on it for stock prices.
"But if the waters rise this high," he said, gesturing at the buzzing trading floor, "then it's a bigger problem than I can handle. My name's not Noah."
Irene will be the first hurricane to hit the U.S. mainland since Ike pounded Texas in 2008.
In Washington, Irene forced the postponement of Sunday's dedication ceremony for the new memorial honoring civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. Tens of thousands of people, including the president, had been expected to attend.
Flooding from Irene killed at least one person in Puerto Rico and two in Dominican Republic. The storm knocked out power in the Bahamian capital, Nassau, and blocked roads with trees.
(Reporting by Tom Brown, in Miami, Daniel Trotta, Basil Katz, Richard Leong, Joan Gralla, Lynn Adler, Ben Berkowitz in New York; Jeremy Pelofsky and Vicki Allen in Washington, Laura MacInnis and Alister Bull on Martha's Vineyard, Ed Barnett in Morehead City, North Carolina; Writing by Tom Brown; Editing by Todd Eastham)
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