headquarters. we continue with the extended coverage of hurricane irene. that s where she is. she s proceed sisly squarely on top of the coast of north carolina. as we give you a look right now at nags head on the coast, we ve watched mark potter and mike seidel really battle it out in nags head. they ve been worried about flooding inland, but right there on the coast you can see the crew taking pictures. you can see between these water wave pictures, there aren t a lot of others out on the roads there. there have been mandatory evacuations and many people have heeded those warnings. of course, we should let you know we re monitoring very carefully janet napolitano, homeland security security and craig fugate the head of fema is letting us know what the federal government is doing to help those affected as a result of hurricane irene. we re watching so many things right now for you. we go from there now to jeff
jeff, stay with us right now. we ll go to tom costello. tom, i understand you ve seen a tremendous deterioration of the weather conditions in the last hour there. reporter: yeah, and i d love to bring jeff in on this. let me orient our viewers. if you go off of my left hand, that s the south down towards north carolina, that s up towards new york, behind me is the atlantic ocean. we have seen a dramatic pickup in just the last hour. i have winds averaging 20 miles per hour. when we stepped out an hour ago, we were 10 maybe. the ocean has really started churning, and what s interesting here, jeff, and i d love to know why and i m sure you can explain it, the rain and wind are coming out of the north. i m getting pelting on the north side of my face here and the wind is hitting us. this is how the storm is churning in the ocean. most certainly, tom. it s kind of shifting and
south of you there, we had mark potter talking about the one, two, three punch. we often here about the one, two. but he said it could be a one, two, three punch out of the storm, which is pretty significant. with regard to ocean city, though, tom, when you talk about the evacuations that were required, how many people seem to have defied those? do you see the presence of residents there? reporter: no, i don t see i literally all morning i ve seen two people who were not associated with the news media or emergency services. the emergency services are driving up and down the beach to make absolutely sure nobody is out there. they give us a wave and move on. i haven t seen anybody else. i think it s been extremely effective. jeff, what comes ahead there for tom costello? he s feeling it coming from both sides, he s getting the effects of things. is that par for the course in a storm like this? it definitely is. on the current track that we re
there. they will be closed down. also the port authority and bus service. that s not too far from times square in that picture you re seeing. every single piece of public transportation, everyone, shut down in 30 short minutes. it will bring new york city to a virtual standstill. there will be a few cars out and about and a lot of taxis will make their way until weather conditions prohibit that from doing so safely. we ll keep a close eye on new york city as we expect irene to pass over new york in about 12 hours from now. on the heels that let s go to jeff frenery. the national hurricane center gave the official up date 30 minutes from so. any changes from that? it made landfall three hours ago with 85-mile-per-hour winds in the center of the storm. the remarkable thing is the hurricane-force winds constitutional with the latest full update stretch out 90 miles per hour from the center of the storm. at that makes it different tan any other category 1 storm here,
let s hope he finds safety as soon as he needs to, though. a lot of people watching would say he should have got there already. we have the radar up right now, and what you see is we re tracking some really heavy rainfall as we saw in the picture, but some continuous rainfall right across nags head right where mike is at this point. they were under tornado watch earlier, and, in fact, in columbia, nearby columbia over here we did hear about two homes that were destroyed and also some minor injuries come inning fr from a tornado this morning. but, jeff, can i ask you, has the eye of the storm even gotten to nags head. do we know where it is in perspective with the entire hurricane? yeah, the center eye is pretty ragged at this point. overall it s i would say it s just off to the west of where mike is. so he s really in co-centric