Hurricane Irene crashed into Little Egg Inlet at 5:40 a.m., making landfall on the New Jersey coast less than three miles from Atlantic City’s Borgata hotel and casino.

Traveling at 18 miles per hour, a hair faster than it was moving when it struck North Carolina Saturday, Irene is “behaving fairly well,” according to Jim Hayes, a meterologist at the National Weather Service’s Mount Holly station.

With sustained winds of 75 miles per hour over land, Irene becomes just the third storm to be classified as a hurricane when it made landfall in New Jersey. The previous strike was also a Category-1 storm near Atlantic City, in 1903.

If the storm continues to pick up speed, New Jersey could see less flooding than expected, but if the storm slowed, Hayes said “the rain bands that are coming a shore now would tend to stay in one place … the longer something stays in one place, the better chance you have of flooding taking place.”

Hurricanes normally pick up speed when they reach the northeastern part of the country, Hayes said.

Even though its moving quickly, Irene hasn’t lost much of the strength she used while flooding towns and uprooting trees along the eastern seaboard yesterday. The storm is still kicking up sustained winds of 75 miles per hour, and Cape May was hit by storm surges as high as four feet when Irene blew by after 4 a.m.

Hayes expects Irene to stay a few miles off the coast and keep its current pace.

“It is actually moving fairly steadily,” he said. “We’re at the point in the storm where it’s behaving fairly well.”

(Source: NJ Star Ledger)