Hurricane Irene rages ashore in North Carolina

MOREHEAD CITY, N.C.,  (Reuters) – Hurricane Irene  howled ashore in North Carolina with heavy winds, rain and surf  today on a path threatening the densely populated U.S.  East Coast with flooding and power outages.
The eye of the storm crossed the North Carolina coast near  Cape Lookout around 7:30 a.m. EDT (1130 GMT), forecasters at  the U.S. National Hurricane Center said.
Irene was moving north-northeast along the coast and was  expected to remain a hurricane as it hit the mid-Atlantic  states on Saturday night and New England tomorrow.
With winds of 85 miles per hour (140 km per hour), Irene  had weakened to a Category 1 hurricane on the five-step  Saffir-Simpson intensity scale, but forecasters warned that it  remained a large and dangerous storm.
New York City ordered unprecedented evacuations and transit  shutdowns as states from the Carolinas to Maine declared  emergencies due to Irene, whose nearly 600 mile (960 km) width  guaranteed a stormy weekend for tens of millions of people.
At daybreak on the North Carolina coast, winds howled  through the power lines, felling trees, rain fell in sheets and  some streets were flooded.
In the port and holiday city of Wilmington, North Carolina,  the streets were empty and the air was filled with the sound of  pine trees cracking.
One unidentified man in the Wilmington area was washed away  and feared to have drowned, emergency workers said.
Progress Energy, the local electrical utility, projected  125,000 customers throughout coastal North Carolina were  without power.
Warren Lee, New Hanover County’s director of emergency  management, said the county was still evaluating damage in the  Wilmington area but that, “We fared pretty well, given the  predictions we had.”
In summer beach season, hundreds of thousands of residents  and vacationers had evacuated from Irene’s path. Supermarkets  and hardware stores were inundated with people stocking up on  food, water, flashlights, batteries, generators and other  supplies.
“Our number of customers has tripled in the last day or two  as people actually said ‘Wow, this thing is going to happen,'”  said Jack Gurnon, owner of a hardware store in Boston.
Airlines canceled nearly 7,000 flights over the weekend and  all three New York area airports were to close to incoming  flights at noon (1600 GMT) today.
President Barack Obama said the storm could be “extremely  dangerous and costly” for a nation that recalls the destruction  in 2005 from Hurricane Katrina, which swamped New Orleans,  killed up to 1,800 people and caused $80 billion in damage.