From: Darren Addy
Irene is weakening as it moves north into cooler waters. Down to 105mph winds now. That's the Good News. The bad news is that it looks like the eye is going to go completely over eastern North Carolina, not just sideswipe it. Bad News for NC. However, that may be good news for points further north as the trip over land will probably weaken Irene even further and lessen the impact on people north of North Carolina.
Outer rain bands reached Raleigh about 4:30pm. Not much wind here [yet], but some heavy rain already at my house.
It looks a lot like Hurricane Floyd from 1999, which brought significant flooding east of I-95. Floyd was also a large-scale Cat 2 storm when it made landfall slightly west of Irene's predicted path.
One significant difference is 1999's Floyd dropped 10 - 20 inches of rain overnight two weeks after Hurricane Dennis which had already saturated Eastern NC with 3 - 10 inches of rain. Dennis hit NC twice, sideswiping the coast on Aug 30, then circled around and slammed straight in running up the Neuse River Sep 4 (ruining a lot of Labor Day weekends).
Ironically, 1999's Hurricane Irene added insult to injury by dropping another 5 - 10 inches of rain on the area a month later.
Luckily we haven't had a Dennis or a Floyd preceding this year's Irene, so I don't think it's going to be as bad as it was then.
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