sheriff s department at the intersection of highway 29 and tamiami trail. they re not letting all of the residents through. there s also other islands beyond everglade city that residents are trying to get to. bridges are washed out. i just rode along with the sheriff s department through town. some people are trying to pass through town on air boats, believe it or not. the sheriff tells me they don t know the of casualties, thank goodness, as of right now. that s what they re out there to survey at the moment driving around looking for anyone who may have stayed through the storm and might be injured. i talked to a family on their porch who had a water line at the bottom of their home about 12 feet. they said the water came up almost all the way to the front door. their roof was torn off by the storm. we experienced the storm last
last five, six, seven minutes. and it does not look like, brian, there is any signed sein of them letting up. right now it s full force hurricane, no question about it. and the beating that marco island, naples, everglade city, ft. myers are going to take are going to be something you re not ever going to forget. that last guy there, mike bettes of the weather channel, these are all friends of ours. these are all friends of ours who chose to put themselves in the line of danger today to bring the story to you. and i know a good many people watching will have a lot of fun with another round of people standing out in storms when there is the safety of a concrete wall next to them, the safety of a rental car. but they do it to show you the effect it would presumably have on you if you were living outside in these storms, and to drive home why the warnings were as severe as they were. this storm is proving
confident that all the hard work that went into tonight, when we come out the other end, tomorrow or the next day, it s going to all have been worth it, correct? well, it s going to be okay, brian. this is a city that is a giving city. it s a resilient city. we are tampa strong. and tomorrow when that sun comes up, regardless of what we are faced with, we re going to pick up the debris. we re going to fix our houses. we re going to wait for the storm water to drain, and we will go back to being the city that was on such an amazing trajectory over the past ten years. it s not going to be without its challenges. we will find flaws in our plan, i am sure. but i think it s not because of hard work and years of preparation. we knew at some point, brian, that our number was up. we hadn t been hit in over 90 years. we knew that some day soon that the odds were against us, and that it was going to be our time. this is the moment that we ve trained for. mayor buckhorn of tampa, thank you, s
night in naples. by the looks of it, what the folks in everglade city went through or returning to is truly first of all, devastating and second heart breaking. > and it was the late turn, relatively late turn of the storm to the west that caught a lot of people unprepared. they swiftly had to revamp. but it wasn t as much time as the rest of florida had given the changing trajectory. that s exactly right. many of these people say they went through wilma. and that this was far worse than wilma. they had a little bit of warning with wilma. some of them came out during the eye of that storm. they said this one is a much more severe storm and blow to this community in southwest florida. thanks so much, jacob. nbc s morgan radford in jacksonville where there s been considerable flooding. morgan? reporter: andrea, you can see we re in downtown jacksonville. this entire area behind me has
mentioned. wauchula, that would be the city right there or the town because you are going through that northern eye wall right now. i m sure it has your attention and it s dark outside. you probably don t have power. and it s just the winds are whistling. you probably never felt your house shake the way it is right now. it s interesting, brian. a lot of people are saying this has taken a path very similar to what charlie did when it came on shore near port charlotte. and it was supposed to come up to east of tampa and ended up going right over the top of orlando. a lot of people are saying is this going to happen again in the orlando area? we ll watch it. there is winterhaven here. this right in here, that s the strongest winds, up to 100 miles per hour. that s what you want to avoid. hey, bill, question from a high school graduate. i hope i can articulate this. the embedded pink doesn t move