the missouri capital. ed larchds in jefferson county tonight. what are you seeing on the ground. hi, wolf, residents in the neighborhood in jefferson city describe an incredibly scary situation last night as the storm was approaching residents tell us they couldn t see the storm but they could hear it. and they didn t realize how bad and dangerous it all was until the windows inside their homes started exploding. widespread damage in missouri. 29 tornadoes ripped through the midwest in the last 24 hours, killing at least three people and injuring dozens more nobody in there. i hope not. i hope not. the weather service rated this massive twister that touched down in jefferson city an ef 3. winds up to 160-mile-per-hour hurling debris 13,000 feet into the air. it sounded exactly how you picture it does. kind of like a train. but you don t expect it.
around that there s nothing else out there, no wind shear, nothing but warm water and this storm is going to get stronger again. even though it lost some of its strength, it s going to be, again, in the category 4, almost category 5 category as we get later on today. right now, we have 160-mile-per-hour gusts, 130-mile-per-hour wind. here it goes, one thing that did change in the 11:00 advisory is the approach time here. now, it looks like category 4 approaching the carolina coast somewhere around 8:00 to 10:00 a.m. on friday. the storm is slowing down. and it s painfully slowing down from here to here is 48 hours. so it s going to rain in this area for two solid days. heavy tropical rain, and that s another thing other than the surge is going to be a flash flood event. rainfall that comes from the sky and floods freshwater, where this surge is going to be a saltwater event pushing over these barrier islands, could be 12 feet over those barrier
we lost power in our hotel a little while ago but that was just briefly for the ten seconds before the generators got back on. one of the biggest outstanding concerns, however-s infrastructure here. many of these buildings are only built to withstand a category 3-type storm. this of course is expected to be much stronger than that, perhaps even a category 5. and that makes a lot of people, including our news crew, quite nervous. rosemary? yeah. understandably. of course a lot of the power is still out from irma, never mind maria. do take care of yourself there. and of course people taking shelter at this hour. many thanks to you, nick valencia. well, want to go to pedram javaheri now. he s been covering both hurricane maria and the quake in central mexico. pedro, what s the latest on the path of hurricane maria, and of course what news do you have for people in mexico on those terrifying aftershocks that they re now experiencing? liet s start with this with the hurricane with maria
san juan already to 92 miles per hour. they re 50 miles from the center. that shows you how long the duration this is going to be. i want to show you some of the pictures of san juan. yeah, you get the idea. this is what the equivalent of a category 1 or category 2 will to. when it gets closer, they will get the gusts. possible san juan, 140 to 160-mile-per-hour gusts. picture a city that has almost 500,000 people, in the general area, it s about 2 1/2 million. wind gusts, 140 to 176 miles per hour that s why we think it s subpoena a crisis. let s go in, we re getting close to that landfall. and humacao, and right now, that s right now in the western portion of the eye wall. there s two eye walls, by the way, this is the inner one right here. then this big red is the new one that s taking over. so the official landfall will be on this portion of the coast right now humacao and yabbakoa.
hurricane maria has strengthened to a category 5 storm. it s taking aim at puerto rico after battering the caribbean island of dominica, packing 160-mile-per-hour winds at this moment. puerto rico s governor fears the impact could be, quote, catastrophic. we are also following several others, several other big stories, including a cnn exclusive. we have learned that the u.s. government wiretapped former trump campaign chair paul manafort, amid concerns he was communicating with russian operatives, trying to influence the election. all this going on as president trump gets set to give his first address to the united nations general assembly. a speech expected to be deeply philosophical. that s what the white house tells us. it will include warnings to north korea and iran. let s start with meteorologist chad myers, tracking hurricane maria. chad? the storm moved right over dominica overnight as a category 5 hurricane. and even the southern tip of guadalupe had the northern eyewall,