Hurricane Irene charged toward New York on Saturday evening, with the city all but closed down in anticipation of what forecasters said could be violent winds with the power to drive a wall of water over the beaches in the Rockaways and between the skyscrapers of Lower Manhattan. The subway system, one of the city’s trademarks, had shut down in the middle of the day.
The city worked to complete its evacuation of about 370,000 residents in low-lying areas where officials expected flooding to follow the storm, and Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey said that more than a million people had been evacuated, mainly from four counties in the southern part of the state.
Officials warned that a big problem could be flooding at high tide, around 8 a.m. Sunday — before the storm has moved on and the wind has slacked off in and around the city, assuming it more or less follows the path where forecasters expect it to go.
“That is when you’ll see the water come over the side,” Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg cautioned at a briefing on Saturday afternoon.
The wide storm lurched onto the Outer Banks of North Carolina in the early daylight hours of Saturday and heaved clumsily but implacably north, leaving in its wake floods, impassable roads and at least six deaths. After proceeding slowly from North Carolina to Virginia, the storm weaved out to sea and onto a path expected to take it to Long Island and New York City.
Despite the city’s efforts, opening 91 emergency centers that could take in 70,000 people, the mayor said that just 1,400 had arrived by 3:30 p.m. Saturday. The only other statistics available pointed to the difficulty of getting people to abide by the mayor’s mandatory evacuation order in what the city calls Zone A low-lying areas: He said 80 percent of the residents in some city-run buildings — but only 50 percent in others — had left by Saturday afternoon.
As the storm pushed toward the New York area, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo ordered 2,000 National Guard troops called up. Mr. Cuomo saw the first of them off from the 69th Regiment Armory, on Lexington Avenue at 26th Street, after saying they would assist the police, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. He also said that some would be sent to Long Island, which could face heavy damage in the storm.
Mr. Christie said 1,500 National Guard troops had been deployed in New Jersey.
The mayor attributed one casualty to the storm, a 66-year-old man who fell from a ladder while trying to board up windows at his house in Jamaica, Queens. A Fire Department spokesman said the man, who was not immediately identified, was in serious condition at Jamaica Hospital Medical Center.
Just before 8 p.m., the city, along with Westchester, Suffolk, Nassau and Rockland Counties, was put on atornado watch, according to the National Weather Service.
“It’s actually common when we have these tropical systems,” said Brian Ceimnecki of the Weather Service. He added that as the hurricane moved up the coast, tornado watches have moved right along with it.
As the transit system prepared to shut down, police officers sounded the warning, strolling along subway platforms and telling people that the next train would be the last. The conductor of a No. 4 train that pulled into the Borough Hall station in Brooklyn at 12:14 p.m. had the same message.
“This is it,” he said, smiling. “You’re just in time.”
Soon subway employees were stretching yellow tape across the entrances to stations to keep people from going down the steps and into a subterranean world that was suddenly off limits, but not deserted. Transit workers were charged with executing a huge, mostly underground ballet, moving 200 subway trains away from outdoor yards that could flood if the storm delivered the 6 to 12 inches of rain that forecasts called for. The trains were to be parked in tunnels across the city, making regular runs impossible.
Mr. Bloomberg said the transit system was “unlikely to be back” in service on Monday. He said crews would have to pump water from tunnels if they flooded and restore the signal system before they could move the parked trains out. That would mean “the equipment’s not where you would want it” for the morning rush, he said. “Plan on a commute without mass transit on Monday morning.”
Mr. Bloomberg also said electricity could be knocked out in Lower Manhattan if Consolidated Edison shut off the power to pre-empt the problems that flooding could cause for its cables. (A Con Ed spokesman said later that the company, while prepared, had no immediate plans for that kind of shutdown.)
Other officials, including Mr. Christie, repeated what they had said on Friday: Evacuate.
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