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NEW YORK: Heavy winds and rains began smashing New York and New Jersey as Hurricane Irene, just over 200 miles from here, closed in resulting in widespread power outages and raising fears of heavy flooding by early Sunday.
"That is when you will see the water come over the side," Mayor Michael Bloomberg said in a news conference.
More than 10,000 people in the New York area had lost electricity by late night, another 5,576 on Long Island, according to the Long Island Power Authority, 4,700 in New Jersey, according to Public Service Electric and Gas and about 400 in the city and in Westchester, according to Consolidated Edison.
"Now the edge of the hurricane is finally upon us," Bloomberg said. "We have warned the public and now we have to deal with Mother Nature."
Tornado warnings were also issued for some areas near the Delaware coast.
In New Jersey, a twister touched down in the south central part of the state, according to emergency management officials. The National Weather Service issued tornado warnings Saturday night for several New Jersey counties.
As hundreds of thousands of residents were evacuated, city officials said the over 90 emergency centers, with a capacity to take in 70,000 people, had remained mostly empty.
They said only 5,500 had arrived by early evening. For a bustling city that never sleeps, New York's roads wore a deserted look with just handful of cars plying.
Mandatory evacuations covered all of the state's barrier island beach resorts, including such well-known and popular spots as Atlantic City, Cape May and Long Beach Island.
Irene was expected to hit the state with at least 75 miles per hour winds and 6 to 12 inches of rain starting on Saturday night.
"Over one million people have left the Jersey shore in the past 24 hours," Governor Chris Christie said at a news conference. "The best way to preserve human life on the Jersey shore is for there to be no human beings on the Jersey shore."
At an American Red Cross shelter in Toms River, about eight miles west of the barrier island town of Seaside Heights, 375 people were preparing to sleep on cots in a high school auditorium, including European students hired for summer jobs.
"We came to the shelter because we wanted to come," said Emiliya Ileva, 22, a Bulgarian student who has been working on the boardwalk at Seaside Heights since May.
"It's the same for me I don't have a place to stay so I just came here," said Stoyanka Simeonova, 24. Both women are from the Bulgarian city of Plovdiv.
Christie said that in Atlantic County, one of three counties evacuated, 90 percent of residents and visitors had left, but a few elderly people were staying put.
The looming storm was bringing the biggest waves of the season in New Jersey, prompting scores of surfers to flock to beaches despite the rain.
"It's the waves," said Guy Gallo of Little Silver, N.J., as he prepared to paddle out into the Atlantic Ocean earlier in the day. "But you don't want to get caught out when the hurricane hits."
At a doughnut shop in Sea Bright, a sign advertising its closing hours read: "Friday 10 p.m., Saturday noon, Sunday, Good Luck."
In Sea Bright, stores were boarded up, a sight that locals said they could not recall ever seeing.
"A lot of people are taking this a lot more seriously," said the borough's emergency management coordinator, Patrick Mason Jr.
A long, narrow barrier beach, Sea Bright is at risk of flooding from the Atlantic Ocean on one side and from the Shrewsbury River on its inland side, he said.
Casinos and hotels in Atlantic City were emptied out on orders of the governor. A state of emergency has been in effect in New Jersey since Thursday.
A southbound stretch of nearly 100 miles of the Garden State Parkway south of the Raritan River was closed, as was the Atlantic City Expressway, which heads to Philadelphia.
A spokeswoman for Cape May County, also under evacuation orders, said only about 10,000 people, out of about 800,000 people who live or were visiting, remained.
She said that according to Atlantic City Electric, some 8,000 customers in Cape May County were without power Saturday eveni
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