Page 4 - Shell Point Beach News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

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 point beach is a small population. for the people who live in this community, this is to the east of pan...

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 let's 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 and jim, you can't overestimate of people that live here. we're south of tallahassee. this is the so-...

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 haven't 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 category four hurricane. there has never been a category four hurricane and close to a category five...

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. let's 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. i'm here east of panama city and south of tal. roads are flooded. we are actually about a half a mile from the beach. we were abou...

The northeast. there's a lot of damage in these little towns we've been touring. a lot of power lines down and we've 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. that's why there was a mandatory evacuation which began at 8:00 last night in this area. i have seen, i've heard other things from other reporters and police officers in t...