Stay updated with breaking news from Rain pummeling. Get real-time updates on events, politics, business, and more. Visit us for reliable news and exclusive interviews.
Back and do some damage. what s really combined. the area already saturated with rain, kerry sanders and we ve also saturated with rain and you combine those factors alone it could lead to substantial flooding. so evacuation has been heavily advised. not everybody took the advice as you know, as we ll find out in a few hours, but for the most part, driving through st. petersburg and the whole of tampa bay, this area specifically is a ghost town. most people heeded the warnings, most people got, out and i think the people that stayed knew that they were going to have to hunker down. the worst thing you can do right now is move either coming back to this area or simply trying to escape it at this point. it s not happening. time to hunker down and wait this out. a bit of a lull state here. it s a false sense of security because it is always followed by another wind gust. back to you. all right. ....
A lot of wind here, too much wind for rescuers to get out there, certainly too much for those 42,000 electrical workers to get out and start fixing the powerlines. we have reports of 1.8 million people already without power. as bill said, this storm is above orlando now, a highly populated area. it s going up to jacksonville. it s going through the st. johns river, which always floods and puts people out of power. then it might make a turn and come back as a category one. this is a remarkable storm, and chris. it has done a great deal of damage. probably the worst is over, but for some people they haven t even had a taste of it. there are some people in florida who haven t had the first drop of rain yet. it s going to take out their power, their trees. so this is a very serious storm chris. the vehicle over your shoulder there, which looks like an rv of some sort or van, presumably parked there, lifted and thrown over, tremendous amounts of damage, just from ....
This is in an area where the storm will have weakened when it reaches us at its full force in the hours to come. it is still hours away, and already we are seeing this. i can tell you, just in the last ten minutes, things have deteriorated rapidly here. thankfully, at this point, we still have power, cell phone communications, and the power outages in the area appear to be minimal. at this point, as officials have warned throughout the day, wherever people are, they should be planning to hunker down. the threat here isn t so much the wind. we re not looking at storm surge here. there will be gusts as high as 90 miles an hour, but the bigger concern here in orlando is more than two feet of rain which could lead to flash flooding, and as we know from previous natural disasters, when flash flooding is in front of you, when you see that flooding coming, that potentially could be too late to get out of the way. yeah, it s an important point. as we just spoke to jamie rhome, when you get t ....
It. which is, a lot of people are looking at what has been happening or not happening in florida. prior to this hurricane, we have actually had a fairly normal season in the u.s. this year. they ve only been a few main storms. for people who are climate skeptics, how do you explain the role of climate change in a year like this? the way i explain it is like this, we know that hurricanes are a natural phenomenon. climate change is exacerbating them, making them worse, like putting them on steroids. we aren t seeing a change in the overall numbers of hurricanes, but when those hurricanes happen they are intensified faster. they re getting stronger, they are dumping a lot more rain on us and they are even moving more slowly. climate change is truly loading the weather dies against us, putting us all at risk. can you explain why the intensification happened so rapidly? ian was category three last night, then just over the course of a few hours this morning became a category four and al ....
This moment a little bit of a lull. you can see through the lights how heavy the wind is pushing the rain, and in a distance, you might be able to see this fountain out there that we re seeing from our photographer tony. you might be able to see how the wind is blowing. that as well as these trees out here. i just saw another flash of lightning. this is mild compared to what we saw in the last 20 minutes or so, and this is also hours before we expect to see the worst of what is left of in here. this has been going on for hours now, and that gives you an idea of how powerful this storm is. hours before, it was still 100 miles away at this point, it might be closer than that. earlier, when it was more than 100 miles away, we were still seeing these powerful wind gusts, enough to make china few breeze wobble, and the rain is continuing to fall. we re starting to see the water pool up in this slipped down driveway that we re in. the water rising above some of the wheels here. ....