Hurricane Hunters Report From Eye Of Hurricane Irene
BOSTON (CBS) - Some residents along the East Coast are already buying up storm essentials like plywood and bottled water.
Hurricane Irene is a gorilla in size, as the view from space illustrates, even though Hurricane Hunters flying through it found a weaker storm.
Follow: Hurricane Irene's Track
"It was pretty disorganized and we could see pretty easily why they had downgraded it," says Hurricane Hunter Paul Flaherty.
WBZ-TV's Ken MacLeod reports
WBZ spoke with Flaherty from his plane inside the storm Tuesday night. Flaherty is a native of North Quincy.
He says flying into storms is, "not as bad as you would think, but when it's bad it's a heck of a lot worse than you would think."
After ripping through the Caribbean for 48 hours, knocking out power to a million people in Puerto Rico, Irene will roll over the Bahamas with 90-plus mile per hour winds.
But after that, the experts believe it'll gas back up to a category three -- or maybe even a monster four -- and head for the Carolinas. Something they haven't seen since Hugo wrecked Charleston in 1989.
And if it comes up the coast to New England, which is a real possibility, some experts are already making comparisons to Hurricane Bob in 1991, or worse yet a similar hurricane in 1938 that killed some 600 people, mostly in Rhode Island.
Flaherty says all the models so far show a large population of the East Coast will be affected.
