Hurricane Earl Lashes Cape Cod

Hurricane Earl finally touched down on Cape Cod Friday night, pummeling the coastline. The storm, which was downgraded to a Category 1 on Friday, will hit Nantucket around midnight. With top wind speeds reaching 80 miles per hour, several storm watches have been changed: Western Long Island and Connecticut are no longer under a tropical storm watch and the hurricane warning in North Carolina has been replaced with a tropical storm warning for north of Ocracoke. "The good news on Earl is that it has been steadily weakening, maybe even a little quicker than forecast," Bill Read, director of the National Hurricane Center, said in a telephone news conference. “It may even go below hurricane strength about the time it passes southern New England overnight tonight.” Meanwhile, the Cape Cod area continues to prepare for the worst, with extra water supplies, power-line repair crews, and debris clearance teams on standby, and several emergency shelters open in the area. “We will see power outages,” warned one official. “We have not seen anything like this” since Hurricane Bob slammed Cape Cod in 1991.