with people, many of them evacuating from other parts of southwest florida, ending up here in orlando for safety, not realizing because none of us realized at that time that those hurricane warnings would then expand to include more inland towns and cities like orlando itself. so a lot of people are hunkering down, hunkering down, waiting to ride this out here instead of at home. but no matter what, they ended up dealing with hurricane conditions. so for now, i ll send it back to you guys. i m trying to make sure i m not missing anything but i think you should stick with us this hour because we re in some action here. just absolutely that wind picking up. and we are anticipating to see those wind gusts. it s good to see power still on . and so charge up those phones. i think for a lot of people who are maybe watching, trying to soak up all that power as they can as we are anticipating it to go out, at least for some , hopefully not. but power crews on standby. we ll continue to check i
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
get power back . they re going to have to wait for these crews to get out and get to those power lines. and those crews are going to have to navigate a lot of the debris that s been tossed into the street right now. this is something that s been expected and something that governor rhonda santurce dress alison, not only there are forty two thousand linemen, they positioned all across the state of florida. as soon as it s safe to go , those power, those personnel are going to go in to to resume power. yeah, and folks are certainly going to have to be patient. this could be a process that takes days because, again, utility crews have to get around, have to navigate through just debris. and once they re able to, they re going to prioritize public health and public safety facilities. we re talking about hospitals, police station, things of that sort. then you also have to consider it rained here for more than twenty four hours. so the ground is just soaking
moved out now. but, you know, these are also the concerning hours when it s dark and you can t see the damage and the debris that s out there. and there s plenty of it out on the roadways. the good thing is that it looks like the worst of ian s elements have lifted out of here. the rain and the wind has cleared out for the most part. the next hurdle will certainly be cleanup, clearing out a lot of this debris that s been tossed all over the place. you can see some of it here behind me, these large tree limbs that have been snapped from from trees and just tossed onto sidewalks and into the streets and they re going to want to have to clean this up pretty quickly because when you consider the amount of people in sarasota county that are without power, three quarters of this county currently in the dark, we re talking about tens of thousands of people who do not have power and are anxiously waiting to
said we had four point four feet over our mean high, high water, which is a pretty significant amount of water on our streets. and we had about 50 homes that actually had water in them as well, 50 homes that were inundated with water is what you were saying due to the storm surge. that you guys saw late in the third. wow. or crystal, what i m curious about, can you tell me a little bit more about what the power outage situation looks like right now in key west for your friends and family that may be down there? sure, there are five hundred and seventy nine homes that are still without power right now. there s about 30 thousand homes in the lower keys that are hooked up to power at our height of losing power. there are about ten thousand homes that didn t have power in last night. and christine, i m curious to obviously, when you re talking about a massive hurricane that came roaring through, have you had an opportunity at all from this