2 million ordered to leave as Irene takes aim

2 million ordered to leave as Irene takes aim

MOREHEAD CITY, N.C. (AP) - Whipping up trouble before ever reaching land, Hurricane Irene zeroed in Friday for a catastrophic run up the Eastern Seaboard. More than 2 million people were told to move to safer places, and New York City ordered its entire network of subways shut down for the first time because of a natural disaster.

As the storm’s outermost bands of wind and rain began to lash the Outer Banks of North Carolina, authorities in points farther north begged people to get out of harm’s way. The hurricane lost some strength but still packed 100 mph winds, and officials in the Northeast, not used to tropical weather, feared it could wreak devastation.

“Don’t wait. Don’t delay,” said President Barack Obama, who decided to cut short his summer vacation by a day and return to Washington. “I cannot stress this highly enough: If you are in the projected path of this hurricane, you have to take precautions now.”

The National Hurricane Center said the storm is unlikely to get any stronger and may weaken slightly before reaching land. It said Irene could weaken into a tropical storm before reaching New England, but that even below hurricane strength it would be a powerful and potentially destructive storm.

Full Story Here:
2 million ordered to leave as Irene takes aim

It appears that barring any *weekend surprises* from the Obama regime, Irene is going to be the BIG story of the weekend!

I have friends and family all through Georgia and the Carolina’s, friends in Virginia, but they are pretty far inland, I have a great friend in New Jersey, fellow political blogger Mr. Alan Caruba, it looks like Irene is going to be a coastal storm, so, I am hoping that all is well.

This is the latest projection from the National Hurricane Center.

Many of my readers know, my children live in South Louisiana and hurricanes are a way of life down there. My son and his wife were in Law Enforcement for quite a long while but both have recently made a career change and are working in the insurance business in disaster response. My son is also a member of the Louisiana Army National Guard and he is well versed in hurricane response.

Talk about irony, or, maybe a quirk of fate; the company that the kids work for just transferred them to Ballston Spa, New York, up above Albany, working in the *call center* and possibly some field response for disasters and so forth.

They are moving this weekend as Irene moves up the coast, they are driving up from Louisiana over the weekend. I have to say, there couldn’t be 2 more well trained and well prepared folks making the journey.

Hurricane warnings were issued from North Carolina to New York, and watches were posted farther north, on the islands of Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard off Massachusetts. Evacuation orders covered at least 2.3 million people, including 1 million in New Jersey, 315,000 in Maryland, 300,000 in North Carolina, 200,000 in Virginia and 100,000 in Delaware.

“This is probably the largest number of people that have been threatened by a single hurricane in the United States,” said Jay Baker, a geography professor at Florida State University.

New York City ordered more than 300,000 people who live in flood-prone areas to leave, including Battery Park City at the southern tip of Manhattan, Coney Island and the beachfront Rockaways. But it was not clear how many would do it, how they would get out or where they would go. Most New Yorkers don’t have a car.

On top of that, the city said it would shut down the subways and buses at noon Saturday, only a few hours after the first rain is expected to fall. The transit system carries about 5 million people on an average weekday, fewer on weekends. It has been shut down several times before, including during a transit workers’ strike in 2005 and after the Sept. 11 attacks a decade ago, but never for weather.

New York City could be a disaster in itself if the City, the Five Boroughs were to lose power for an extended period of time, chaos could ensue. People are not ALL going to evacuate and if electric power is gone NYC will rapidly run out of food to feed those that remain. I assume you see the potential danger in that happening?

There is, so far, with all things considered, one thing that bothers me greatly:

North Carolina Governor Suspends Gun Rights

“State of emergency order makes criminals of concealed handgun permit holders, sport shooters and hunters.”

According to the story, Governor Beverly Perdue signed Executive Order Number 62, declaring a state of emergency in preparation for impending Hurricane Earl. This, in accordance with North Carolina statute 14288.7, would effectively make it illegal for a citizen to transport or posses a weapon “off his own premises.”

In the 1876 case U.S. v Cruikshank, the US Supreme Court wrote regarding the Second Amendment that:

“This is one of the amendments that has no other effect than to restrict the powers of the national government, leaving the people to look for their protection against any violation by their fellow-citizens of the rights it recognizes, to what is called…”internal police.”

When could people possibly need “protection against violation by their fellow citizens” more than during a state of emergency, when law enforcement and emergency response is spread thin? These are exactly the times when citizens should have the right to keep and bear arms; times of crisis is, in fact, what the writers of the Constitution had in mind. SOURCE

I don’t have ANY major news source to link as citation but this story has been floating all afternoon via gun blogs and so forth.

I know that certain people were disarmed in New Orleans post Katrina, but they were threatening police and National Guard troops and were firing random shots. As far as I know this matter in North Carolina is a pre-emptive strike against gun owners that may very well need all the protection for themselves, their homes and their neighborhoods as they can get.

It’s a damned shame to criminalize them before anything happens, don’t you think?