it s forecast to reach major hurricane status baring down on cuba. the storm s path otherwise uncertain, but floridians are prepare ing for the worst. people are filling sand beings to protect against the heavy rains and storm surge. long lines outside of stores as people look to stock up on supplies. you can see the empty health ises there. bottled water, wasn t of the hot est items. florida is under a state of emergency. governor ron desantis activated the national guard. joining us is michael brennan, acting deputy director for noaa. thank you so much for being with us on this morning as we re watching ian approach here. give us a sense of where you are watching and when you re expecting landfall. well, you can see ian right now is located about 90 miles southwest of grnd kay men with intense activity developing near the center. we have seen this intensify rapidly. if we look at the forecast now, we re expecting ian to turn from its northwestern motion and move towar
a pretty low lying area. that storm surge they re preparing for, what exactly might that look like when it comes to the businesses and the homes in that area? reporter: well, to give you a sense of howe things look where we are right now, we re at a park that s surrounded by three bays, the old tampa bay, the tampa bay and then that third bay. what they re worried about, especially the folks in pinellas county, that storm surge is going to flood things no matter what. even if that forecast track ends up having ian moving parallel to tampa bay and the tampa area, they still believe we re going to see a lot of that water making its way inland. so they want folks to go ahead and come out and get these sandbags. the lines at these three locations were pretty long. it s our understanding they re going to continue to do this today and tomorrow and most likely into wednesday. however, emergency officials again have been telling folks, try to get this done early because we could
to go ahead and stay put. the last time that tampa was hit directly by a hurricane was 1921. officials are really concerned that, if that storm makes its way here, we re going to see significant storm surge associated with it. we re talking about anywhere between 6 to 8 feet of a storm surge. you ll have all that water being pushed up along the coast and into the tampa bay area. the mayor said a decision on evacuation hasn t been made yet. she was expecting to get a briefing this morning. we could be getting more information from her on that. scores across hillsborough county have been closed through at least thursday considering that a lot of their buildings will be used as storm shelters. that is giving us an early indication it does seem like this county is moving forward to, at some point, go ahead and issue some sort of evacuation order for residents that live in
supplies are dwindling we re talking about children who are dying from medicines that are available ten kilometers away at the regular the muskies pharmacy that they can t get to because of the siege sara the u.n. has put together an evacuation list of civilians but an evacuation hasn t happened yet why is that. so they want to cite administrative and security that is but there s also the fact that the syrian government has refused to evacuate these medical cases despite the fact that there is a plan and case and this has meant that around twelve twelve people have actually died since the plan has been put in place simply because they re waiting for these people to give them permission to it s now apparent that process forces have tightened the siege since october why is that so there are a couple of reasons. the closure of the smuggling tunnels in early february to april of twenty seventeen which were which were used to to provide aid and also
didn t think the weather is going to be that bad. and they put in plans to evacuate people from low lying areas. here is what he told me. we re not contemplating evacuation at all. the hotels should be fine and dry. and standing water on low lying roads, but evacuation hasn t entered into our preparation plans yet. we want to keep the visitors and delegates safe. and the storm is moving with west, one bad day, some rain and then it s gone. and it s lack to rnc. and it doesn t look like tomorrow, that the weather will be that bad, but the rnc s hands are tied and the secret service took down the tents. it was more than an abundance of caution, there were high winds and took planes out of the sky. and you have to get people to the convention and is the threat over once the storm has