Life threatening Flash Flooding and historic Storm Surge. It left towns across the Gulf Coast completely underwater as floodwaters submerge cars, crashed over highways and seeped into homes. At least six people have lost their lives. Take a look at this, rescue crews in pinellas county, encountering homes engulfed in flames as they try to save people trapped by rising waters. Right now, helene has weakened to a tropical storm, as it heads north, putting 42 Million people under flood alerts. Millions across the south are still without power. And here is the moment when the eyewall hit perry, florida. Jesse kirsch was reporting live on the air. Reporter i can tell you that we have had intermittent moments of really powerful gusts. Were getting some right now, again. This is some of the i want to point out, i dont know if you can see it off in the distance, but there are cars out here, i can tell you, 45mileperhour winds, not to be on the roads anymore. Anyone out here, presumably, not a
Cnn breaking news good evening. I m abby phillip in new york. Our special coverage continues tonight of hurricane helene, a monster category four storm that is now moments away from making landfall in florida. At this moment, it was too late now for folks along the coast too evacuate. Officials warned that the winds and the storm surge will be be catastrophic in some areas, the word that they are using is unsurvivable helene could be the strongest storm on record for the big bend region. And we are already starting to see a major surge in these cities. So we have our anchors and our correspondents. They re fanned out as the storm is now hitting and we have chad myers as well with the latest forecast in the cnn weather center. Let s go first to john berman. He s out in tallahassee in the socalled dead on a hit zone, john, what s happening where you are right now? yeah the winds have really started to pick up abby over the last half an hour. The rain really coming down here, you can see
As we move forward into a new year, we're taking a look back at the Tampa Fire Rescue and the challenges its faced with tight resources and a growing population.
Some of Tampa’s top influencers got a chance to hear from Tampa's fire chief firsthand about public safety challenges being created by Tampa’s rapid growth.
county and tampa bay area is going to be the flooding, right? we re talking about a storm surge as you noted, jake, anywhere between 4 and 7 feet. right now the tide is falling, but this time tomorrow we expect to take into account of course all this rain which is starting to fall. we re talking anywhere between 4 to 8 inches of it. we ve also got to figure in high tide, and then we ve got the storm surge going to make its iowa in here. the concern is the flooding, hurricane shelters and we re told those can hold up to 20,000 people. let s stay with the tampa area right now and bring in the tampa fire rescue chief. chief tripp forecasters are predicting up to a few feet of the storm surge, a few feet above that. you re born and raised in tampa. how concerned are you? how are you preparing? we re definitely concerned. we did do an evacuation zone for those low-lying areas and making