the national guard will be on station for at long as it takes. rick: that makes us here in new york feel a lot safer and a lot better. michael squeezy, the brigadier general. he is the commander of the joint task force irene. and he was kind enough to talk to us on the phone this morning. thank you very much. best of luck to you, sir. thank you, take care. rick: thank you very much. i like that last answer. it does make us feel a lot safer. rick: we will be on the job, too folks. ainsley: hurricane irene making landfall in three hours in new york. fox & friends coming up next. earlier than usually. i m ainsley earhardt. rick: i m rick follow folbaum. the wind speed has come down to 75 miles per hour as it has skirted past the jersey shore. it s headed up to new york city. and, begin, we will have to wait and see exactly what you have got in store for us. thank you so much for the tweets and the comments and the posts. stay safe, everybody.
maria molina is in our new york weather center. rick was so nice to check on this little device for us to find out what time the sun is coming up. 6:18. a lot of people are anxious to see the damage in their area, especially those who lost power. we feel safer when we see and the sun is up. what s the latest for our viewers. you should not be heading outdoors if you live in new york city area or jerusalemy. you are still under a hurricane warning and wind gusts that could potentially still do some damage. you really need to stay indoors and heed those warnings. seriously, if you do live eastern north carolina though where the storm system has began to move away from your area, those hurricane warnings have been discontinued for some parts. so that is something you can start to head outdoors. please be very safe. do not go into any flooding areas. okay. there could be stuff underneath
the water you cannot see. right now the national hurricane center has downgraded the winds. the maximum sustained winds of hurricane irene still a hurricane. still a category 1 storm with the same winds now of 75 miles per hour. so they have downgraded it by a. it was originally 80 miles per hour earlier today and landfall is still expected across western long island or eastern portions of the new york city area as we head into later this morning within the next six hours and it is forecast to remain a hurricane during this landfall still looking at hurricane force conditions. again a lot of heavy rain 15 inches across the portions of new england and storm surge very dangerous ainsley. we are talking 4 to 8 feet possible across the new york city area or long island. ainsley: thanks for that information for working so hard for us. thanks. rick: you heard mayor michael bloomberg of new york telling people earlier to stay put after evacuating almost 400,000
i hope she is okay this morning. thank you so much. ainsley: sure. the latest on this storm we are going to talk to maria coming up and find out what the national weather center is telling her at this point so we can relay that message to you. rick: stick around.
not manhattan right now. we are still good to go. obviously the thing is long from over. rick: long from over is right. thank you, julie. thanks. ainsley: live to beach. what advice do you have for the folks down there? we are where you are going to be probably tomorrow morning. hopefully we can help you out a little bit. what we are seeing here is still some big gusts of wind around 51 miles per hour later. the biggest thing for virginia residents is assessment. we did experience extreme flooding. we didn t have the same saturation that you do. did experience rainfall from 6 to 8 inches. an 8-foot storm surge. so official what officials are concerned about is 4,000 people across virginia that spent the night in shelters last night are going to be waking up and go straight to their homes. that being said, there is more