Is concerning. It is a little bit, especially for florida, because the slower it moves, especially after its made landfall and just sits there, the more time it has to dump rain. So we look at what the storm is doing right now. Here you can kind of see that Forward Movement northwest at 10 miles per hour. The sustained winds are 110 miles per hour. Keep in mind that is 1 mile per hour off from a category 3 storm. We are tinnicontinuing to see t storm strengthen. The eye wall is trying to close up a little bit. Thats a sign theyre going through an eye wall replacement cycle so its very likely this will be a category 3 storm at some point today, likely in the next three to six hours. We do still anticipate it to get up to a category 4 in strength. Its moving through an environment that has very low shear and very warm ocean temperatures. Both of those things really help the development of systems like this. We still expect that landfall most likely to be in the southern half of the state
year, what are your concerns for flooding? what might that look like? we ve got some historical paths based on experience. roads could be underwater. we have a handful of communities that could be isolated depending on if their only road in and out is compromised. so part of our emergency services strategy is make sure we can still respond to 911 calls in those communities. really the big part right now is for folks to be ready, for them to have their plan in place to be able to activate that plan and watch and wait to see what happens and then take actions when they need to. do you think that residents are understanding that or are they looking to the coast and thinking the worst is going to be there? are your residents realizing, hey, we could be stuck in place for two days if this thing churns over us? we feel that certainly in the middle of the state from what we ve seen locally and in the media reports around the state, people are taking it serious. there have been long line
evacuation orders. paul womble is the emergency management director for polk county, florida. sir, thank you for joining us to tell us what you re doing on your end there. how are you preparing? thank you, brianna. we ve had our team meeting with eoc here, bringing in all of our stakeholders, plan out our sheltering strategy, our emergency services strategy for responding to either a wind event or rain event or what looks like it could be both for us. we ve convened our board of downy commissioners this morning and they declared a local state of emergency here in polk county. we ve talked about some government closures. some school closure information is just coming out to support our shelter k ing operations. we ve got our plans in place, we re watching the track of the storm waiting on confidence in that forecast from the hurricane center to increase and get to a point when we know we re ready to go, the team is ready.