ainsley: so what s the latest there in tampa? we have all of our crews out there assessing the damage. police officers and fire rescue person nefl have been on the streets since about 2:00. all of those reports are coming to this office behind me. so we re trying to get a feel for what it looks like. we know that there is a lot of limbs down. there is a lot of power outages and telephone poles that are down. there is not much standing water, thankfully. but, yet, the surge is still ready to come. we have not hit high tide. we have people prepositioned to notify us. but so far it s looking much better than we anticipated. brian: mr. mayor in new york city they have these monitors where can you see almost every block from a command center. somehow tampa situated in terms of cameras. what are you able to see from where you are? we can see an awful lot. as a matter of fact, we installed those the last time i was with you was during the republican national convention. there are big part
sparking rapidly rising life threatening water levels. storm surges that could climb up to 15 feet. 10 to 15 feet of storm surge, i don t know how anybody survives that pray. i don t see prayer as a last resort it should literally be a first resort. literally pushing up against the window to prevent it from possibly breaking. in. brian: as multiday siege rages on. live team coverage from across florida to miami fourth in of tampa. steve: most of the state waiting for the sun to come up so we can see the damage. naples, florida, people got hammered and some under water. 90% of the people there waking up without electricity. griff jenkins has battery power and he joins us live with the breaking details unfolding at this hour from naples. griff? ?well, i said he had battery
steve, it will be as intense as if we had gotten a direct hit from this. since this is the back side. but it s still. ainsley: jeff, what about high tide? that s this morning. that s the other factor. yeah. i m glad you brought that up. because that is the other factor. we re expecting high tide here between 6:00 and 9:00, depending on where exactly you are along the coast. in the tampa bay area. just so you know, for those who don t know what that dire are a beach is. this is a barrier island that is off saint pete which is of course, east of tampa. tampa is actually a little bit writer/directorred. it s these barrier islands that is going to take the bulk of the crap there. brian: how did you get there? is there a bridge? yeah, well, there are bridges. you probably can t see it because it s behind me. but there is a bridge that goes from madeira beach across to treasure island that may know the geography
virgin islands got especially hit. and listening earlier about the power. likely a rebuild. we re not sure that we can repair the power grid in the virgin islands. of course today we will look at the assessment of the keys as it goes up. fortunately, it looks like tampa and the you were part of florida was not hit as hard as we thought. but, certainly, the president s focus is leave no neighborhood behind. and let s not forget about the forest fires out west. still a lot of communities under threat. very few fires are contained to the point where we have to keep our eye off the ball. brian: rushing $221 million to the u.s. virgin islands because a lot of them they were saying over the weekend they feel kind of ignored. that s going to change once you get them that money as well as puerto rico. but, i also noticed that you re in shanksville. you are on shanksville on 9/11. before you became congressman and secretary, you were in the military. i am just curious, mr. secretary, where were
storm. we will get another update from the hurricane center at 8:00. you can see it is weakening. it is over land. the reason why we won t get the incredible storm surge totals we were predicting yesterday is because the storm has moved more inland. if it was more offshore and in that warm water, we would potentially be seeing higher storm surge totals. not to say that it s not going to be a big event. it will be. thankfully as this storm has moved northward it has lessened. now the storm is weakening, which is great news. not out of the woods. we have folks in florida, close to 5 million people without power. and the tropical force winds are going to extend into georgia, alabama, even the tennessee river valley over the next couple of days with the potential for flooding. so there is the radar. and you can see again the back side of that storm moving into central florida including tampa. we have the most powerful winds here in north florida, just heading into jacksonville. and the cen