This article was reported by Kim Severson, Dan Barry and Campbell Robertson and was written by Mr. Barry.
WILMINGTON, N.C. — After several anxious days of dire forecasts that forced much of the East Coast into unprecedented levels of lockdown, a weakened but still ferocious Hurricane Irene made landfall on Saturday morning along the southern coast of North Carolina.
It announced itself with howling winds, hammering rains and a gradual, destructive move northward toward the battened-down cities of Washington, New York and Boston.
Shortly after daybreak in Nags Head, on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, surging waves ate away at the dunes, while winds peeled the siding from vacated beach houses — as if to challenge the National Hurricane Center’s early morning decision to downgrade Irene to a Category 1 hurricane, whose maximum sustained winds would reach only — only — 90 miles an hour, with occasional stronger gusts.
“Some weakening is expected after Irene reaches the coast of North Carolina,” an update by the hurricane center at 8 a.m. said. “But Irene is forecast to remain a hurricane as it moves near or over the mid-Atlantic states and New England.”
The massive storm was expected to push out to sea again later Saturday and then head north toward New York, where the specter of an electrical shutdown was added to the list of potential consequences. The region prepared to face powerhouse winds that could drive a wall of water over the beaches of the Rockaway Peninsula and between the skyscrapers of Lower Manhattan.
The city scrambled to complete evacuation of about 300,000 residents in low-lying areas where officials expected flooding to follow the storm. Officials also ordered the entire public transportation system — subways, buses and commuter rail lines — to shut down Saturday for what they said was the first time in history. Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said mass transit was “unlikely to be back” in service on Monday, but electricity in Lower Manhattan could remain out.
“This is just the beginning,” the mayor said at a morning news conference in Coney Island, Brooklyn, where he and Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly inspected boats that emergency workers could use in neighborhoods they could not travel through any other way. “This is a life-threatening storm.”
Officials said the central concern at the moment was the storm surge of such a large, slow-moving hurricane — the deluge to be dumped from the sky or thrown onto shore by violent waves moving like snapped blankets. “I would very much take this seriously,” Brian McNoldy, a research associate of the Department of Atmospheric Research at Colorado State University, said. “Don’t be concerned if it’s a Category 1, 2, 3, 4. If you’re on the coast, you don’t want to be there. Wind isn’t your problem.”
Mazie Swindell Smith, the county manager in Hyde County, N.C., which is expecting storm surge from the inland bay that abuts it, agreed. “The storm is moving more slowly than expected,” Ms. Smith said. “That’s not good as far as rainfall, because it will just sit here and dump rain.”
With the first hurricane to make landfall in the continental United State since 2008, government officials issued evacuation orders for about 2.3 million people, according to The Associated Press — from 100,000 people in Delaware to 1 million people in New Jersey, where the governor, Chris Christie, told everyone to “Get the hell off the beach.” And in New York City, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg took the historic step of ordering the evacuation of several waterfront areas, including Manhattan’s Battery Park City.
On Saturday, both Mayor Bloomberg and Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York were stressing the seriousness of the situation, telling residents in the evacuation zones to get out for their own safety. On Friday, city officials issued what they called an unprecedented order for the evacuation of about 370,000 residents of low-lying areas, while on Long Island, county and town officials ordered a mandatory evacuation of about 400,000 people.
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