pinellas county emergency management director cathy perkins joins us now. cathy , thank you for being with us so early in the morning. i know these overnight hours, but they re also very important hours because you ve gone all day feeling the impacts of hurricane ian . talk us through how things are in these overnight hours and what your plan is for the day ahead. so we ve been monitoring any impacts we hear. we certainly have about two hundred thousand people without power right now. we re not seeing major damages here, but it will be felt like before we really get to see that, we re very fortunate we didn t get the rains that we thought we were going to get . i mean, two days ago, we thought we were going to be ground zero for this storm . so this is a very different scenario for us . we have our damage assessment crews ready to go out and just look at the county and see if there s any areas of concern. we have debris crews. they ll on the roads, just make sure that everything is goo
assessment teams on standby ready to get out there and assess the community s roads, infrastructure, the homes, windshields, even. we re ready for that. we also have a bunch of locations for sandbag operations because where we are on the st. john s river, actually , it could be a delayed response for that flooding. it could be even in monday or tuesday when we see flying on the st. john s river, lake harney or in sanford, florida, where we are. so we are going to be reopening sandbag operations as well to make sure that we mitigate against any potential flooding and that aftermath of this as well, we have debris crews ready on standby as well, start picking up debris that blocking roadways and also making sure our traffic engineering folks can get those traffic lights back online so our people can move around our county. it s such a different narrative when you compare it to what the west coast was up
0 our growing family. i need a home office and i needed us to not have a roommate anymore. and real time alerts made sure i never missed out on the listing. it makes home buying so much easier. start saturday, strong saturday on fox .com. we called michigan s dominant ground game in a tough protest against dial. a lot of big names saturday on fox. this is fox, whether on fox news and we re tracking hurricane in a powerful and dangerous storm making landfall as a cat for her game this afternoon in southwest florida, just west of fort myers. yeah, incredible video out of the bay. and i m sure it s only going to continue to, well, stream in this in all the video. let s just say that an overall slow moving, bringing those catastrophic winds, as you see, playing the video, as well as that life threatening storm surge, widespread flooding, power knocked out to more than two million across florida. the devastating winds, all of this is heading north northeast. so we ll talk about the flood
0 with first cause of this surge right now. reporting in fort myers, robert ray fox. whether. all right. thank you so much for sticking with us. right here on fox weather. a hurricane in a water log in southwest florida. streets and buildings completely flooded, as you can see here. power knocked out to two million people. and one of the most powerful storms ever recorded in the united states . the hurricane making landfall wednesday afternoon near jocasta. a protected barrier island just west of fort myers in the hours since landfall in have moved inland, hurricane force winds likely to be felt well into central florida. yeah, thanks again for sticking with us right here on fox. whether i m local customer. and i m jim enah. thank you for joining us and a special welcome to those watching on fox news channel. well, the 2:00 a.m. advisory is in mike lindell, still a category one hurricane. so no major changes there, although and continues to shift and land continues to weaken just a
a lot of them have been taken down. more than 25,000 debris crews and lineman from at least 30 states are rolling in to support you. some are already prepositioned and close and hopefully are already underway. but we need to be prepared and we re about as prepared as ubsd be for the early stage of this. there s a lot more to do. we also know a lot of people lost their cell phone service. if their particularly carrier tower is down or damaged. this morning the federal communications commission has worked with a cellular providers to initiate the cooperative framework agreement. that agreement allows customers on one line with one provider to go to another provider if that provider is down. it allows customers to use roaming access carriers to any of the carriers up and running. that means you should be able to get a signal no matter who your