Keeping an Eye on Earl

Hurricane Earl has been downgraded to a Category 1 storm. Beaches around here were closed today, boats pulled out of the water in anticipation of the storm. But Earl has not kept New Yorkers from heading to the shores of Long Island, hoping to get in a few days of R&R this Labor Day weekend.

And among those vacationers are a number of members of the WNYC staff -- including our morning hosts Soterios Johnson, who is on holiday in East Hampton, and Richard Hake, out on Fire Island.

Soterios, let's start with you. You are the farthest out, in East Hampton. How is Earl treating you?

Well, the seas are rough, I'll tell you that. I'm standing on Main Beach right now in East Hampton, New York, and the seas are very rough, it's kind of windy, a bit drizzly. But things are not as bad as people were fearing that they might be. The beaches are kind of roped off, you can get onto the beach, you can't get that close to the water, though. But things are not as bad as people were fearing.

East Hampton was on track to get hit by Hurricane Floyd back in 1999. You were out there then, too. How does Earl compare to Floyd?

I have to say, so far, Earl does not hold a candle to Floyd. Floyd was actually supposed to make a direct hit to the East End of Long Island, back in 1999, and so people were very fearful about that. And it actually missed the East End of Long Island but it was still a lot rougher. The seas -- these waves are about 15 feet right now. In 1999, we came out here, at the beach, and saw waves that must have been at least 25 feet. I mean they were huge waves. So it's kind of rough right now, but it's not nearly as bad as what Floyd kicked our way 11 years ago.

Soterios, it sounds like your cell phone's going to blow away. Richard, you are on Fire Island. The ferry service to Fire Island stopped at 3 o'clock. Have you spoken to people who were on the last ferries coming in? Did they say how their ride went?

Well, Amy, actually the ferries are still running here on Fire Island Pine. That was actually Bayshore, Long Island, which is closer to the city, that part of Fire Island. Fire Island is 34 miles long and a quarter-mile wide at its most narrow point. So the ferries are still running. They're canceling actually the later ferries that are coming in through the Fire Island Pine pier. What we did find was a lot of people actually came in in advance of the storm. They don't want to ruin their Labor Day weekend, so the island actually got pretty crowded. I was here all week long, there were talks earlier, before we knew where this storm was going to head, that we would perhaps have to evacuate. Now, Fire Island is an extremely fragile barrier island that is along the South Shore of Long Island, basically protecting mainland Long Island from the Atlantic Ocean. On a normal storm, normal Nor'easters that come up this way, there's tremendous beach erosion. And that is sort of what we've been seeing when we went up to the beach earlier today. Soterios mentioned these huge waves are now breaking and actually coming up to the dune point, coming up to those staircases on the little narrow boardwalk if you know Fire Island, and staring to wash up into them. There's beach replenishment programs that go on here all the time, the beaches are kind of designed for this, so we'll just have to wait and see what happens here on Fire Island.