from cat one to cat five. the island in dominica is crying out for help. they got nailed by 160-mile-per-hour winds. all of the reports i ve heard is that structures are destroyed. report of the hospital roof has been knocked off. the generators is not operational. you can imagine the pain that is going on there. slowly get today break here in dominica. direct hit. only the second time in recorded history we ve had two cat fives in the same hurricane season make land fall. a lot of times the storms stay out to sea. not this year, barbuda and dominica go down in the history books dealing with cat five storms just two weeks apart. they re in the north eastern quadrant of the storm. cat four now. the high elevation of dominica did weaken it slightly. still a hurricane warnings up for many areas here. nieves, puerto rico, virgin
people here or has that stopped? we are now only taking voluntaries. we stopped our involuntaries late yesterday afternoon because we had to let our medical professionals go so they could go take care of their families. all right. thanks so much for being with us. i apologize for our time constraints. i want to get you some of the latest pictures that we re getting in from cuba as they are now just now experiencing really the worst of what they re going to see. there s patrick or one of his crew members but we re talking about possibly 23 foot waves that have already been recorded there in cuba and you see the side of the palm tree there and 160-mile-per-hour winds. this is the first category 5 hurricane to hit cuba in 85 years. these people for the most part
to make landfall in the florida keys sometime early sunday. the latest track puts the west coast of florida in line for much of what the worst of irma will bring. we re talking from fort myers through sarasota, st. petersburg, tampa as well. florida s governor. the mayors across this state are pleading with people still in evacuation zones. those mandatory evacuation zones do get out and get out now. hundreds of people, thousands of people across the state are headed to county shelters. and some people spent the night on the west coast sleeping in their cars on the side of the road waiting to get into a shelter. because this is what is coming. look at this. irma. beating up on cuba. there are, i mean, feet of water in some places. that s not an exaggeration, considering what our patrick oppmann who is there on the north coast has been showing us. 160-mile-per-hour winds. broke the equipment there that
center, where the worst of this storm will go, that s been a gentle vacillation over the last 24, 48, 72 hours. and again it s a hurricane 4. but i wanted to ask you, we know those waters are warm and how long will it talk for it to get to gflorida and is it enough tie to escalate again? 24 hours to get to keys. the storm skirted along cuba. did some significant damage to the northern coast of cuba. the people that were still here received 160-mile-per-hour winds, not barbuda type damage but close because of the way the structures were built but it also took the steam out of the storm it brought it down significantly. i know they re still saying 150, but i m looking at the hurricane under aircraft. they re finding 130 and that s
that s where we re seeing the 160-mile-per-hour winds right now. no matter where you go, it s not going to be good. it s slowed down to 12 miles per hour? yes. which isn t surprising. when you see the eye interacting with the northern portion of cuba, it slowed down. but that turn is coming. and it will turn to the north. the reason i asked that, is when we were talking about harvey, which was really slow, the pace of walking, that is what hurt the state of texas and louisiana so much. and in this case, you don t see that happening, even though it s slowing? right. it s a very different scenario. if harvey, the storm had nowhere to go. there was no feature moving it out. in this case, we have a strong feature lifting it to the north and on shore and out. it s not going to ride all the way up to new york. it will dissipate eventually. so all the computer models are