beyond are able to hold up those houses under normal conditions. that one is tilting there to the right of your screen. goodness knows what is going to be the condition of that one on what would normally be pretty constitutional righty stilts to suspect a house. you re looking at a category 1 hurricane coming ashore with continued pounding of waves and winds for quite some time. you got to wonder how state of these things are, jeff frenery, who joins me right now. these look scary at best. there has to be nobody in there right now. they do their best to protect against these things. in 2008 i covered hurricane ike in texas, and sometimes you get homes on stilts where they get knocked off the pilings because of a long duration wind event like we see. this isn t just two hours of these winds. this is now about six hours of hurricane-force wind gusts in
check out the situation. it s not exactly what people what governor christie wants people to do. he wants them to get away from the shore and a lot of businesses are closed here. take a walk over to me, you can see the waves churning up here about an hour ago we saw a couple of surfers try to take to the water. they have patrol teams out here. they did not make it in. further south they did. i m sorry for the sbrurps. jeff has an update from the hurricane center. what s the latest, jeff? in terms of the wind speed, it s still 85 miles per hour at the current moment. the central pressure has also stayed the same at 952 millibars. it s moving a little bit quicker here, north-northeast at 15 miles per hour, but i really think the remarkable thing about this update is innot wavered in strength at all. we re talking about a hurricane
there. they re confident. take care. let s hope their confident for good reason. let s hope so. thank you very much for that. let s go to jeff frenery to give us a look at those folks in virginia. they re playing it low-key right now, but they have something coming five, six hours from now. maybe ten hours out, but nonetheless it s making its quick advance here up the atlantic seaboard. the pictures have been amazing, alex, as we ve watched all morning long, mike seidel and mark potter. also something of note, you can see that red box up there. that is a tornado watch bock in effect through the early afternoon. we had one report of a tornado touchdown, two homes destroyed just outside nags head, north carolina in columbia. the tornado threat is with us. we ve already seen tornado reports, so there s no doubt that we also could see more of that. let s look at some of the most powerful winds where this storm
back there, and they may have occasion to change their mind. thank you very much. let s go to nbc meteorologist jeff frenery. as ron described, it s a hearty bunch a lot of guys say we ll ride this out. what do you think is heading their way? it looks exactly the same. i was looking up and down the coastline. this storm will pick up more forward motion by the time it gets to massachusetts and connecticut, it s still a long duration wind event here for most of the mid-atlantic states. now, as we look right now at the radar, what we re finding is the eye of the storm really hard to define and somewhere in this vicinity. we know a lot of other reporters right out here near nags head, all kill devil hills. they re going to be continuously lashed with outer bands throughout the next six hours or so with this event already continued to have these winds here across the carolina coastline in excess of 70 miles per hour for about the last five
the enorm mitt of irene. it s the sustained winds and storm surge that really poses such a problem. the nags head reporting has been extraordinary there from mike seidel from the weather channel on the beach. let s see if we can hook up now with nbc s mark potter also in nags head, jeff. mark, can you hear me? you ve been up above where mike seidel is. things don t look like they re getting any better at all? reporter: i actually think, alex, they re getting a little bit worse. this may be the strongest wind we ve seen so far. that center of the storm is to our southwest and moving so slowly northward as you guys are talking about, and that means now for several hours we have just had this sustained, heavy wind and rain coming at us horizontally. with the storm moving so slowly, we could have hours more of this. i heard mike in his interview a moment ago talking about the trip we took.