Read here. What makes a hurricane? Wind speed, plain and simple. If a storm has wind speeds below 74 MPH then it is a tropical storm not a hurricane. Irene never came close to the '74' threshold. The national media never reported the true conditions of Irene.
Gee, what a surprise that the left/liberal anti-science "journalists" would misreport the weather facts.
"So, despite looking at Irene before, during, and after both landfalls, there is no hint of a hurricane anywhere. By the time it got to New York the eye of the storm had dissipated, what was left were huge bands of rain clouds. Is there a moral in this story? Well, I can understand people taking extra precautions, better safe than sorry is a good rule. And I certainly imagine that when the Weather Service re-examines the records, the error will be corrected. But that doesn’t help in making the decisions. As soon as Irene hit land, it should have been downgraded immediately to a tropical storm. That’s what it was, not a hurricane making landfall but a tropical storm. As far as I can tell, we still haven’t had a hurricane make landfall during Obama’s presidency, a historical oddity."