cyclone. associated press reporting at least 30 people have died, including 27 in florida. griff: ian now set to bring heavy rain to the east coast after definiting leaving devastating damage and landfall again in the carolinas, ap confirming at least 35 have died including 27 in florida. welcome to fox news live. i m griff jenkins. jacqui: good to be with you all, i m jacqui heinrich. and molly is in south carolina, and adam klotz in the weather center and rich at the white house. we ll start off with steve harrigan in north port. jacqui, the water in north port is going up and they re struggling to make rescues. a waiting list of 500 people, calling 911 they re trapped by the water and want to get out we ve seen national guard, and private citizens, too, trying to help people. you can see the houses one after the other have become little islands about chest high, four or five feet height of water around some of these houses. first responders are joined by a lot of people
category 4 storm leaving a huge path of destruction and millions in the dark this morning. we ll have a live report in just a moment. meanwhile, rescue crews have been busy trying to get people who decided to ride out the storm to try and save them. they re stranded now by rising flood waters and we re still tracking ian as it slowly makes its way across florida. at this hour, it still has more to go. good morning, and welcome to morning joe. it s thursday, september 29th. joe is off this morning. along with willie and me, we have the host of way too early, white house bureau chief at politico, jonathan lemire. without power this morning, first light this morning will begin to show the damage in florida. that s right. that s when we re going to start to see the story of what happened last night, what happened overnight. tropical storm now ian downgraded from a category 1 hurricane. in just the last hour, but still wreaking havoc across florida as it made landfall as a
hour. the category 4 storm is currently barreling across southwest florida with winds up to 150 miles per hour. more than 1.5 million people in the state are currently without power, and that number is growing. but the most imminent and life-threatening concern is the storm surge. some areas seeing 12 to 18 feet. to give you an idea of just how severe that is, a meteorologist for the national hurricane center says no one alive has seen 12 feet of storm surge in that area, and many areas could take years to recover. just take a look at this surge today. the dangers are a reality for many who chose to hunker down and wait out the storm despite the evacuation orders. take a look at what family told nbc affiliate wbbh as their house flooded. so this is ft. myers beach on cutlass drive. it s four of us. four of us? on cutlass drive. and you re on the second floor already? yeah. six of us in here. do you have do you have a roof? 15 feet of water now. there s 15 fe
millions of floridians in this storm s path. those who have not evacuated are urged to shelter in place immediately. almost 800,000 people are already without power. that s according to florida utilities. the director of fema has warned that recovery from hurricane ian will be a very long road. that agency has already begun to pour resources into the state. in an event earlier today, president joe biden said he spoke with florida governor ron desantis and added he already requested aid saying, quote, the federal government is ready to help in every single way possible. ali velshi who has been doing the heroic job of bringing the story to all of us from naples, florida, is our first guest. ali, tell me what you re seeing. i ve been watching all day long. please tell me how you re staying safe. reporter: we always appreciate that. what did we just lose there, peter? something has come off the building that we re in. in fact, we re seeing a lot of that. moments ago we saw a fr
a text out, some might go through, some didn t. so we were trying to text people to ask them to let us know what was going on, which thankfully, we have friends that were able to text us updates, but we still didn t know, especially when our like i didn t get pictures of the worst of it, it got higher, the flood waters, we were busy trying to put everything up high, like our computers, up on top of the fridge, and we made a blanket and towel barricade to try to slow the water coming down from outside, which it did help, we didn t get as much water inside as some of the other places around here. we re looking at a picture on the screen now, i believe of that towel barricade and with the stand-up paddle board maybe to reinforce the windows? we had the paddle board in case things got worse, and we had to leave the house and if