good morning. it is friday, august 26th. welcome to american morning. it s all about the hurricane today. i wish i could say happy friday, happy friday for those not living along the northeast coast. and whom it hasn t reached yet. exactly. let s talk about hurricane irene. now said to be a massive and powerful category 2 storm sitting just off the east coast. 50 million people could feel its force by this weekend. new hurricane warnings are now up, they stretch from north carolina to new jersey. states of emergency have been declared as far north as new england. irene totally hammered the bahamas yesterday with torrential rain, 115-mile-per-hour winds, north carolina like i is next. in atlantic beach a surf shop boarding up, mandatory evacuations under way along the outer banks and could be the biggest storm to hit new york in decades. people all the way up the coast are being asked to leave or to get ready. i understand sometimes folks think that people overreac
heading back to washington, d.c. a day ahead of schedule. earlier he called irene a historic storm. i cannot stress this highly enough. if you are in the projected path of the hurricane, you have to take precautions now. don t wait. don t delay. we all hope for the best but have to be prepared for the worst. irene is on track to follow the northeast corridor right up to new england and beyond. cnn is there. reynold wolf is in new jersey, and athena jones is in annapolis, maryland. we will start here in the weather center with cnn meteorologist, chad meyers. chad, give us an idea of where irene is now. not too much changed overnight. the storm did get a little stronger, and as it got stronger, you could see the eye. at 2:00 in the morning, you could truly see the eye. now we don t see it anymore. that tells me the storm is being torn up by a little bit of sheer. it s still a 105-mile-per-hour storm. it will not say category 3 or 4 anymore, but don t let your guard down.