NEW YORK, N.Y.— New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg says residents who had been ordered out of their homes in low-lying areas will be allowed to return Sunday afternoon.
Bloomberg says the evacuation order put in place for Hurricane Irene will be lifted as of 3 p.m. He had ordered more than 370,000 people out of those areas. They were mostly in lower Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens.
Not everyone waited, and people had already started making their way back to their homes. Some defied the order and didn't evacuate in the first place.
Irene unleashed furious wind and rain on New York on Sunday and sent seawater surging into the Manhattan streets. But the city appeared to escape the worst fears of urban disaster — vast power outages, hurricane-shattered skyscraper windows and severe flooding.
Water rushed over the wall of a marina in front of the New York Mercantile Exchange, where gold and oil are traded, and flood water lapped at the wheel wells of yellow cabs.
But the city's biggest power company, Consolidated Edison, said it was optimistic it would not have to cut electricity to save its equipment. The Sept. 11 museum, a centrepiece of the rebuilding of the World Trade Center site, said on Twitter that none of its memorial trees were lost.
And Irene made landfall as a tropical storm with winds of 104 km/h, not the 161 km/h hurricane that had churned up the East Coast and dumped 30 centimetres of water or more on less populated areas in the South.
“Just another storm,” said Scott Beller, who was at a Lowe's store in the Long Island hamlet of Centereach, looking for a generator because his power was out.
Irene weakened to winds of 96 km/h, well below the 119 km/h dividing line between a hurricane and tropical storm. The system was still massive and powerful, forming a figure six that covered the Northeast. It was moving twice as fast as the day before.
The storm killed at least 14 people and left four million homes and businesses without power. It unloaded more than 30 centimetres of water on North Carolina and spun off tornadoes in Virginia, Maryland and Delaware.
And even after the storm passes in the Northeast, the danger will persist. Rivers could crest after the skies the clear, and the ground in most of the region is saturated from a summer of persistent rain.
But from North Carolina to New Jersey, the storm appeared to have fallen well short of the doomsday predictions. Across the Eastern Seaboard, at least 2.3 million people were given orders to evacuate, though it was not clear how many obeyed them.
Max Mayfield, former director of the National Hurricane Center, said the storm wasn't just a lot of hype with little fury. He praised authorities, from meteorologists to emergency managers at all levels, for taking the threat seriously.
“They knew they had to get people out early,” Mayfield said. “I think absolutely lives were saved.”
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., Mayor Rick Meehan posted wind readings and reported: “Scattered power outages. No reports of major damage!”
Charlie Koetzle was up at 4 a.m. on Ocean City's boardwalk. Asked about damage, he mentioned a sign that blew down.
“The beach is still here, and there is lots of it,” he said. “I don't think it was as bad as they said it was going to be.”
Under its first hurricane warning in a quarter-century, the country's largest city had taken extensive precautions. There were sandbags on Wall Street, tarps over subway grates and plywood on storefront windows. The subway stopped rolling. Broadway and baseball were cancelled.
John F. Kennedy International Airport recorded a tropical storm-force wind gust of 93 km/h. Kennedy, where on a normal day tens of thousands of passengers would be arriving from points around the world, was quiet. So were LaGuardia and Newark airports. So was Grand Central Terminal, where the great hall was cleared out entirely. Part of the Holland Tunnel was closed.
And 370,000 people in the city had been ordered to move to safer ground, although they appeared in great numbers to have stayed put. A storm surge of at least one metre was recorded in New York Harbor, and water pressed into Manhattan from three sides — the harbour, the Hudson River and the East River.
“You could see newspaper stands floating down the street,” said Scott Baxter, a hotel doorman in the SoHo neighbourhood.
New York firefighters made dozens of water rescues, including three babies, and said they were searching bungalows that had floated down the street in parts of Queens. The wind and rain were expected to diminish by afternoon.
The National Hurricane Center said the centre of the huge storm reached land near Little Egg Inlet, N.J., at 5:35 a.m. The eye previously reached land Saturday in North Carolina before returning to the Atlantic, tracing the East Coast shoreline.
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