and winds, not that bad. 56 in eastman, probably the worst of it. isolated damage to trees. most likely trees that have already gone down. and besides the records i ve shown you, everybody is saying it s the strongest storm to hit the panhandle of florida, and i think the fact that this is the strongest storm we ve ever recorded in the month of october is a pretty impressive record. the previous strongest was 130-mile-per-hour winds, this was 155. i ve seen pictures of the middle school in panama city. the gym has no walls left. you can see the basketball court. we re going to we ll see a lot more, unfortunately, when the sun comes up. we ll see picture like this and what damage was left behind. as you saw, we ll see rows and fields and forests of downed trees probably for 200 or 300 miles from where it made
michael now third on the list, ahead of andrew. if it had another three or four hours over water, it would have definitely gone up to a cat 5. and now, some wind damage problems with trees falling in central georgia. an additional tornado watch issued for all of south carolina. isolated tornadoes at work. and winds, not that bad. 56 in eastman, probably the worst of it. isolated damage to trees. and besides the records i ve shown you, everybody is saying it s the strongest storm to hit the panhandle of florida, and it s the strongest ever recorded in the month of october. the previous strongest was 130-mile-per-hour winds, this was 155. i ve seen pictures of the middle school in panama city.
strongest was 130-mile-per-hour winds. we were 155, that s off the charts stronger and more intense. so we keep breaking terrible records, we keep seeing what everybody talks about as 100-year storms or 500-year storms and floods and all these things happening. does it feel like things are more extreme, both with individual storms and in terms of the frequency of extreme events, just because we re seeing them in close proximity or are things getting worse? that s what everyone wants to know, did we hit the tipping point? i think the message has changed. it always used to be, you know, this storm happened because of climate change. you don t hear that now. what you hear now is, we always had storms in the past. but this storm was stronger than it should be because of climate change. so they ll take this storm, they ll take a study of it and put it in the computers and see, you know, did a warmer planet, did warmer gulf water
miles per hour, likely today, turns into hurricane michael. it s already raining in the keys but this is not a keys event. this is a panhandle event from apalachicola to pensacola, and maybe tallahassee. that would be a lot of wind and knocking down trees in that area here. hurricane hunter just found a wind speed of 66, not a hurricane yet, but later on today, it will get stronger. in very warm water in the gulf of mexico. it s bath water in there still. it s october, but this is some of the warmer air, warmer water around here. 110-mile-per-hour storm by wednesday after midnight tuesday. you see how close and quick this is because the gulf isn t very big. with most of the storms we see them, they re in the middle of the atlantic. we have days and days to prepare. not with this one. this could be a 130-mile-per-hour storm, making landfall there. makes a huge difference. huge whether it hits
emergency personnel after a certain point. once the wind speeds get above 50 miles an hour, many of our emergency personnel vehicles are hightop vehicles. they have potential for rollover. we have high water here. once that threshold is met, i won t send people out to risk their lives for people who didn t heed the warnings. that is really valuable for people to know, because 50 miles per hour comes early. i mean, this is 130-mile-per-hour storm, right? so 50 miles per hour is a low t threshold, so people need to understand that at 50 miles per hour they re not going to get help. that s correct, and they ll be there basically all alone until that threshold is met again and we have winds under that speed. all right, we appreciate you issuing that warning this morning. obviously we wish you the best of luck and we will be checking