Page 2 - Shell Point Beach News Today

Residents will have their choice of several celebrations across land and sea to celebrate the Fourth of July this holiday

The Departments Florida Healthy Beaches program samples water from beaches along the coast and reports water quality every week.

Keeping beach access open 24 hours, that's what Wakulla County Commissioners will soon decide on.

Got a word that tyndall air force base near the hospital we were just talking about, thats still shut down. usually air force bases are able to withstand this kind of thing, but apparently they suffered catastrophic damage at the air force base and dont know when its going to be functional again. >> thanks very much. brian todd reporting. lets go to our correspondent gary tuchman in crawfordville. what are you seeing there? >> reporter: wolf, earlier in the day we went to a town 15 minutes away ...

Gone. >> we have our entire team spread across all of the danger zones. lets begin with gary in shell point. look, it has gotten worse for you there in the last hour. >> things are getting bad quickly and the worst is still yet to come. this is shell point beach, florida. its a very vulnerable area. this town only has 300 people. its a boating town, a tourist town. it got decimated 13 years ago during hurricane dennis. there is a lot of concern. i think what gives us some comfort from covering h...

Has gotten worse. tell us what you are seeing. >> reporter: jim, the conditions continue to deteriorate. we expect that to happen for the next several hours. what is amazing when we arrived an hour and a half ago it was calm. it is amazing after covering hurricanes you think it is not as bad as expected. the bands move in and you realize you are in for a nightmare scenario. that is what people are going to experience in this part of the florida panhandle. this particular part of town, shell poin...

The monstrous category four storm. that means 140 miles an hour, winds and up, would be the most powerful hurricane to hit this area of the state of florida in history. >> it is incredible. right now winds topping 145 miles an hour. they are, if you can believe it, expected to get stronger before making land fall. in just a few hours lets go to our colleague in shell point beach, florida. gary, we can see the wind whipping you right now. what have you felt and what is expected? >> well, poppy an...

We thought we saw someone hurt in the street. it turns out it was king kong lying in the street, advertising sopchoppy pizza. we hope they do okay. but this is the town about 470 people live here. we havent seen anyone around. almost everyone seems to haver evacuated, which is very good news. this is old florida. they have an annual worm charming festival, ww-o-r-m, an they use the worms for bait and they do that every year now here in sopchoppy, which is going through the scare of this strong c...

Brought it up that georgia needs to start paying attention to this because it could still be a category 2 when it crosses over that florida georgia line as it is moving so fast. this is important for more than one state to be paying attention to. thanks so much. lets get to the east of where we expect the eye to make landfall. gary tuchman is in shell buoypo beach, florida. how has it been changing? >> reporter: the last hour and a half we have had a driving rain. im here east of panama city and...

The northeast. theres a lot of damage in these little towns weve been touring. a lot of power lines down and weve seen transformer fires on the sides of roads. we spent part of the day today in shell point beach. quickly the water started rising because of great concern here and is still a great concern because these are all low elevations right now at ten feet and the storm surge is expected to go as high as 13, 14 feet. thats why there was a mandatory evacuation which began at 8:00 last night ...