running. listen. it s got you got to hope for something. they re not as heavy as they look. for the most part you pray and hope everything comes well and you come out like you go in, yes, ma am, walking. reporter: south and east of here, saint bernard parish, heavy rains and surge have already caused localized street flooding there as it s coming down sideways, so really the worst is yet to come for so many other communities that are in ida s path. just because we talk about a category 4 storm making landfall and that that happened hours ago certainly does not mean that this is over. we can t reiterate that enough. this is going to be going for quite some time, impacting a lot of people. eric. eric: it s a great reminder, whether it s the railroads or the power, there are a lot of people behind the scenes who risk themselves to get everything up and running like
down here. there are bridges to all of this. even though the bridges they cut them off to regular folks. fools like us they let us in. so, yeah, the bridges are open. steve: the bridges are open. and so is jeff flock describing what is going on down there in madeira beach in the tampa/saint pete area. brian: jeff, it s okay to put your hood on now. steve: he kept trying but it kept blowing off. ainsley: so nice we all have friends and family that live in that area, they all have questions, janice, about how is this going to effect their houses. one of my best friends lives right there in that area outside of clearwater. janice: that s why if you live in florida and there is a lot of very low lying areas especially along the west coast, you have to know your surroundings, right? you have to know where you are on the sea level. if you have a storm surge or what the flooding is like. are you near to a floodplain? are you near a river? that s why it s really important if you move somewhere
pray. i don t see prayer as a last resort it should always be a first resort. ainsley: as irma s new at this day siege raises on. people got hammered by the storm and 90% waking up without power there. griff generagriff jenkins joins us live. good morning guys. finally light coming up here. we re getting a look at what this was here in naples. that is a catastrophic wind event power lines, palm trees and pools of standing water. rising flooding. not necessarily storm surge but certainly rising floodwaters are making the area treacherous as people wake up without power. give you a very quick look. can you see this shopping center. that sign knocked down, just debris everywhere. you look this way. and as we slowly turn around, these roads, which have palm trees over there some the car going by.
we re still dealing with tropical force winds and pounding rain here. we are in high tide. the water behind me inching closer but as you can see we have not witnessed and we are probably not going to see any catastrophic storm surge here, which is excellent news for people in this area. this was a part of the mandatory evacuation zone. we have been here now for about 24 hours and very little humans in sight. people abided by the evacuation. in fact, one of the fire chiefs here saying that people evacuated so well they were able to do a second sweep in this area. so this place is practically a ghost town. janice was mentioning those on shore winds and we are definitely feeling them right now. the water inching closer to the land but it looks like we are just not going to see any terrible flooding. sun is coming up here, so we are not able to totally survey the damage in this area, but the manager of the hotel that we re staying at sent us some pictures and said there is a howard johns
storm. we will get another update from the hurricane center at 8:00. you can see it is weakening. it is over land. the reason why we won t get the incredible storm surge totals we were predicting yesterday is because the storm has moved more inland. if it was more offshore and in that warm water, we would potentially be seeing higher storm surge totals. not to say that it s not going to be a big event. it will be. thankfully as this storm has moved northward it has lessened. now the storm is weakening, which is great news. not out of the woods. we have folks in florida, close to 5 million people without power. and the tropical force winds are going to extend into georgia, alabama, even the tennessee river valley over the next couple of days with the potential for flooding. so there is the radar. and you can see again the back side of that storm moving into central florida including tampa. we have the most powerful winds here in north florida, just heading into jacksonville. and the cen