over fears a dam could completely fail, potentially creating severe flooding. fema says the country remains without power and some 95% of cellphone towers have been destroyed. i want to bring in cnn s rafael romo who is in san juan. rafael, is help arriving or is this island still nearly cut off? reporter: it s both, fredericka. fema is here, the national guards from two different states are here, bringing help, bringing people, bringing resources. the problem is roads around the island are frankly impassable so help is not getting here right away. we have seen how many trees are downed by the storm. light posts are completely blocking many streets. the main worry right now, in
throughout tomorrow morning. we re expecting the height of it tomorrow. it can be a catastrophic storm. the mayor in san juan in an emotional interview today told us she did not want the u.s. mainland to forget about puerto rico. irma just grazed the island, more than 60,000 people are still in the dark. the power grid they fear could fail. there could be a massive collapse of communications, cellphone towers are down. authorities are urging people, they urged them to evacuate. more than 500 shelters have been set up, brian. again, we expect the worst of it to hit here within the next several hours. back to you. gabe gut areas in san juan. bill, of course was my on-air
what is going on. if you are there is hard to figure out what is going on. is a chaotic time and we will have less intelligence because of that. you mentioned encryption. how there are those that are part of these terror groups that are good at social media and encryption. i am curious on this point. we keep going back to places like yemen where yemen has a problem with running water from time to time. how is it in some of these areas that the technology is so advanced versus what we see from our own government. how do you view that? it is interesting that cellphone technology for example is very easy to deploy easy to put up cellphone towers and give people running water. there are more cellphones on the planet than news brushes. that is paradoxical from where we re sitting but sometimes these technologies work even as everything else collapses. other times you will have the communications infrastructure
jams on our highways right now on either side of i-44 that took direct hits with trailer parks in the areas. there are many side streets that are jammed up with traffic, communication is very hard with cellphone towers and also downed power lines throughout various areas of the state, particularly in moore and this vicinity, too. communication is very hard. we re asking the public to be as patient as possible in letting us work what we need to and knowing that we are doing everything we can to assist those that are in need right now and bring out the resources. i wanted to say thank you so very much to the media. media has been a suburb job over the last few days of superb job and weatherman driving and tracking the storm itself. as i visited around today and