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29 March 2024

Hurricane Irene US toll rises to 12

Rain from Hurricane Irene cover a window overlooking Times Square in New York. (Agencies)

Published
By Agencies

The death toll from Irene has risen to 12 across five eastern US states, emergency officials said Sunday, as the hurricane was downgraded to a tropical storm, passing New York City.

Half of the deaths were in North Carolina, where Irene made landfall early Saturday morning with 85 mile (140 kilometer) per hour winds, before heading up the eastern seaboard and scoring a rare direct hit on New York.

The toll rose from eight overnight with new fatalities including a man hit by a falling tree in North Carolina, a woman in Maryland hit by a falling chimney, and a man killed by a storm-related electrical fire in Connecticut.

The breakdown of fatalities was: six in North Carolina, three in Virginia, and one each in Connecticut, Florida in Maryland.

The youngest fatalities were a boy killed by a falling tree in his apartment in Newport News, a city on a coastal peninsula in Virginia, and a girl who died in North Carolina.
"A 15-year-old girl was killed in a car accident on her way back from the beach after vacationing in North Carolina," explained emergency official Patty McQuillan. "The traffic light at the intersection was not working, the power was out."

North Carolina emergency management spokesman Brad Deen said one of the six victims in his state was a man who had a heart attack on Friday while nailing plywood over his windows in preparation for the hurricane.

Two people were also killed in the state in separate driving accidents. Another North Carolina fatality was a man struck by a falling tree limb while outside feeding his animals.

One storm-related death was a 55-year-old surfer who took to his board in treacherously high waves off the Florida coast on Friday.

"We had sent out an advisory recommending everyone check beach reports and use an abundance of caution before entering the water," state emergency official William Booher told AFP.

Irene is on track to continue up the east coast Sunday into the densely populated northeastern states of Connecticut, Rhode Island and Massachusetts.     Officials warned that flood damage from Irene's heavy rains may be felt for days, and millions of people are without power.

Earlier report

Hurricane Irene tore Sunday into New York, hammering Manhattan's skyscrapers with fierce winds and threatening to flood the financial district after killing at least nine people along the US east coast.

The first hurricane to hit the Big Apple for a generation swept in overnight, accompanied by lightning, reports of tornados and deafening rainfall. Wind strength grew steadily and was forecast to cross the 50 miles an hour mark before dawn, then up to a peak of 80 miles an hour.

The city resembled a ghost town after 370,000 people were told to evacuate flood-prone areas, including near Wall Street and at Coney Island, and mass transport was shut down.
Subway trains, buses and the famous Staten Island ferry all closed Saturday, as did all nearby airports, paralyzing the nation's biggest city.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg told a press conference that running from the storm was no longer possible.

"At this point, if you haven't evacuated, our suggestion is you stay where you are," he said. "Nature is a lot stronger than the rest of us."

Irene made US landfall at 8:00 am (1200 GMT) Saturday at Cape Lookout, North Carolina, near a chain of barrier islands and quickly proved deadly.

At least nine people died Saturday -- in car accidents, by heart attack and by falling trees -- in North Carolina, Virginia and Florida. The youngest victim, an 11-year-old boy, died when a tree crashed through his apartment building in Newport News, Virginia.

On its passage up the coast, Irene knocked out power supplies for well over a million people, triggered the cancelation of more than 8,000 flights, and forced nearly two million people to evacuate, half of them in New Jersey.

Early Sunday, the eye of the storm was just southeast of Ocean City, a resort town in Maryland.

Officials in New York said the biggest danger was from flooding caused not just because of tropical-style rainfall, but a surge of wind-driven seawater pushing up from the Atlantic, especially at high tide early Sunday.

City areas at risk of being swamped included parts of the financial district in Manhattan and low-lying beach resorts in Brooklyn and Queens and on nearby Long Island. Boat owners scrambled to get their craft ashore and officials across New Jersey and New York pleaded with residents to keep off beaches.

Officials say Manhattan's skyscrapers are not at risk of serious damage, but warn that power outages might strand residents without light, water or elevators.

The disruption took on an international character after the area's three big airports -- John F. Kennedy International Airport, LaGuardia and Newark -- were ordered to stop all flights at 10:00 pm (0200 GMT).

The flightaware.com website, which tracks airport arrivals and departures, estimated that 8,337 flights would be canceled during the weekend, mainly US domestic trips. It warned that the figure would rise.

President Barack Obama, who cut short his summer vacation, visited the Federal Emergency Management Agency's operations center in Washington, where he said the east coast was in for a "long 72 hours."

Obama chaired a meeting at the National Response Coordination Center set up to marshaling federal and local hurricane-relief efforts.

"This is going to be a tough slog getting through this thing," Obama said during a video teleconference including senior federal officials and local government agencies.
Some 65 million people live in the urban corridor from Washington north to Boston, and experts have said the damage could cost anything up to $12 billion to restore.

"This is going to be a very serious storm, no matter what the track is, no matter how much it weakens. This is a life threatening storm to people here," Bloomberg said.

Irene's approach stirred painful memories of Hurricane Katrina, which smashed into the southern Gulf Coast in 2005, stranding thousands of people in New Orleans and overwhelming poorly prepared local and federal authorities.

Hurricanes are rare in the northeastern United States -- the last major hurricane to hit New York was Gloria in 1985 -- but this time authorities say they are ready.

The US military said up to 101,000 National Guard soldiers were available if needed and designated military bases in three states as staging areas.