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state of emergency tonight, it comes as florida is dealing with catastrophic damage from in, at least 17 people dead tonight. there are fears that that number will go up. cnn's chief climate correspondent is bill weir, and he joins me now. bill, hello once again to you. you say this is some of the worst damage you've ever seen in your career. covering these disasters. tell us what you saw? >> well, by that i mean, don, there are certain sort of moments and scenes in storms that are just burned into your brain, katrina for a lot of the reasons that we all know. that was such a man mad...

All smashed together. definitely not supposed to be here, carried here by the storm along with other pieces of the dock. there's a couple of oars scattered around, other miscellaneous pieces of boats. and then, if you just go over here, i want to show you something really interesting. this right here, this is another boat, of course on that side, this is the boat line. if you follow this boats line it goes all the way over here, it took, this is a piece of dock, it's still attached to it stop. this boat carried its own dark through the wind through the storm surge over to dry land. so, if you ...

Her away. and then we watched another rescue where they picked up two people in stretchers with the hooks and everything and pull them up as well. they were working night and day nonstop. >> well, my goodness. i'm sure people are wondering why you stayed, but as i understand, you came to check on your condo. and you decided to stay. you didn't think the storm would be this bad. would you have stayed if you had known? >> definitely not. now that we're stuck here, now that we actually saw the situation was created by this, the family back home and stuff, not being able to guide them through that...

Had. and now they're trying to figure out how to put it back together. if you look at this right here, this is the other side of that boat, and a sort of makeshift boat yard now. you can imagine the force of the water in the winds that that could carry this size of a boat here and do this much damage to it, don. it is just incredible to see it up close and imagine the force of those winds is just absolutely remarkable, don. back to you. >> no doubt, randi kaye, thank you very much i appreciate that. let's bring in now scott carlos, who rode out the hurricane in fort myers. scott, appreciate yo...