Irene batters shuttered New York but worst is over

NEW YORK, (Reuters) – Hurricane Irene lashed New  York with heavy winds and driving rain today, flooding some  of Lower Manhattan’s deserted streets and large parts of the  northeast, but the feared major devastation was avoided as the  storm lost some of its punch.
Irene was downgraded to a tropical storm this morning  after marching up the East Coast, leaving 11 dead, as many as  3.6 million customers without electricity, forcing the closure  of New York’s mass transit system, and the cancellation of  thousands of flights.
“It’s safe to say that the worst of the storm up to and  including New York and New Jersey has passed,” Homeland  Security Secretary Napolitano said late Sunday morning as the  sun started to peek through the clouds in New York City.
She said pre-storm preparations dramatically reduced the  loss of life, but warned that river flooding across the eastern  seaboard posed a danger.
While weakened, the swirling storm still packed a wallop,  sending waves crashing onto shorelines and flooding coastal  suburbs and broad swathes of New Jersey, where residents  reported basements full of water and numerous trees down.
There was about a foot of water in the streets at the South  Street Seaport in Lower Manhattan before the tide began  receding. There appeared to be less damage than many had  feared, and New Yorkers shrugged it off.
“It’s not bad as they said it would be. The streets are  flooded but not as bad as I thought,” said John Harris, 37, who  defied an evacuation order and stayed home overnight in the  Rockaways.
Wall Street’s financial district seemed largely unaffected  as did Ground Zero, where the 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11  attacks is soon to be observed. The New York Mercantile  Exchange building planned to open as usual on Monday, while the  New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq Stock Market also said they  expected a normal trading day.
But the big question for residents and the millions who  commute to work in the city each day, was whether the city’s  subways and public transportation would be allowed to resume in  time for Monday’s rush hour after being closed from noon on  Saturday.
About 370,000 city residents were ordered to leave their  homes in low-lying areas in an unprecedented move by the  authorities. It was unclear when they would be allowed to  return.
BEACH DAMAGE
Heavy rains and wind forced the closure of three bridges  leading to the Rockaways peninsula facing the Atlantic Ocean,  and further east on Long Island sand berms built to hold off  the flooding and protect coastal businesses appeared to have  failed. Six inches of rain fell on Central Park.
Irene was blamed for at least 11 deaths in North Carolina,  Virginia, Florida and Maryland as it churned up the East Coast.
By 11 a.m. EDT (1500 GMT) Irene’s winds had diminished to  60 mph (95 kmh) and the center had reached Danbury,  Connecticut, about 70 miles (112 km) northeast of New York.
There was a general sense in New York that the storm,  reported on breathlessly for days by television reporters, was  not as bad as it could have been.
“The water looks really groovy, it’s like in that movie  ‘The Perfect Storm,’ — it’s swelling every way and the wind is  blowing it every way, it’s heaving,” said Jill Rubenstein,  speaking from her third-floor apartment in an evacuation zone  at the Harlem Yacht Club on City Island in the Bronx.
New York City’s normally bustling streets were mostly quiet  overnight but as the waters receded, tourists and locals began  venturing out for a look around New York’s Times Square, where  Broadway shows had been canceled in anticipation of the bad  weather.
In Astoria, Queens, about a dozen people were out on the  waterfront overlooking Manhattan, some snapping photographs of  a partially flooded playground.
The storm dumped up to eight inches of rain on the  Washington region, but the capital avoided major damage. Some  bridges were closed but airports remained open and transit  operated on a normal schedule.
Rick Meehan, mayor of Ocean City, Maryland, said initial  assessments showed flooding and continuing power outages in  some areas of the seaside resort, but not much damage.
“It looks like we dodged a missile on this one,” Meehan  told the local Fox News station, WBOC News.
New Jersey Governor Chris Christie told NBC’s “Meet the  Press” he expects damages from Irene to be costly, possibly  worth billions of dollars, along the Atlantic coast and from  inland river flooding.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency said it could take  several days to make preliminary damage assessments.
On the south shore of Long Island, Jim Nolan, a 55-year-old  architect, was out making his own assessment of the area around  his home on the shore of a lagoon at Copiague. But downed trees  and flooding stopped him from driving very far.
“It was about as bad as I expected,” he added of the storm.  “The more scientific weather channels had a tropical storm, the  high end news companies had doom and gloom reports of 80 to 90  miles an hour — I just didn’t believe it.”
He had a busy night taking care of his 34-foot cabin  cruiser tied to a dock by a number of lines that broke during  the night. “About 3 O’clock two snapped, two snapped about four  or five o’clock and one snapped half an hour ago,” Nolan said.  “It was nice and warm so I put my bathing suit on and went out  there to work on it with my son,” Nolan said.
BAD YEAR FOR U.S. STORMS
From the Carolinas to Maine, tens of millions of people  were in the path of Irene, which howled ashore in North  Carolina on Saturday, dumping torrential rain, felling trees  and knocking out power. The storm was forecast to pass over  parts of Massachussets and Rhode Island later today.