to the east. maybe miami is out of the cone right now but until we get close to land fall we want to make sure everybody on the east coast is on alert. particularly on the west coast. with the track changing, the cone of uncertainty has shifted west to the gulf by the time we get to sunday evening we re looking at a powerful storm making land fall not once but twice in the keys and on the main peninsula of florida, perhaps naples. don t always put your eye on that, it s not necessarily a exact point of where the storm will land. it s just a average what we see between the models. monday we re looking at a storm of 160 miles an hour winds. that threat for flooding and heavy rain into georgia and the carolinas exist. you can see the eye wall, looks like it s doing a eye wall replacement cycle which we ve seen it do many times before, it allows it to strengthen and weaken and it goes through the
westward schiff in the models, worst-case sncenario for the keys. further west, the strongest part of the eye could impact the keys. we saw the gas stations earlier, final gas track that came along, everybody lined up filling up with gas so they had enough gas to evacuate i-95. smart decision. with a category 4, category a storm here, the immense size of it as well. so much larger than hurricane andrew, another devastating hurricane obviously. people know it very well around here. the impacts of this are going to be like nothing we ve ever seen here been in our lifetime. mike, to you now. what do you make of the storm s path at this point? well, the track hasn t changed very much, it s still heading to south florida. one thing that s concerning, as through the last few hour, it s going through an eye wall replacement cycle and looking like that eye is going to be a bit bigger which means the wind field could expand out.
happening. so it s been going through an eye wall replacement cycle. when you have the big storms, the center eye gets so tightly wound and you get another one form on the outside of it. when it goes through that process, it weakens a little bit. the energy pulls out so the winds come down. what happens eventually often, the inner wall caves in on itself and that only becomes one primary outer wall. i m sorry i m giving you so much information. i asked. i want to know. the viewers want to know, too. the outer wall begins to contract again and strengthen. so the pressures come down a bit. it s been going through this cycle. that would indicate to me that that is happening and the outer why yeah will take over and has the potential to strengthen again. that s why this category four, category five, doesn t matter, this is a major hurricane and has been a long time. it means it has a ton of water attached to this.
this is 55 miles per hour stronger than landfall with harvey in texas. 55 miles per hour. that, alone, will snap some power lines and down some trees. good news is, we re looking at the eye to stay north of san juan, but the wake it has left and the destruction, we are now watching, we talked about it, that the eye would swallow barbuda, which it did. st. martin, france s foreign minister said the tallest building had been completely destroyed. most of the buildings have been destroyed or partially. we haven t heard anything from anguilla. moved across the british virgin islands. minor flooding really in some of the harbor around st. croix. now that it made landfall in the islands, it s going to take another day before they can get flights, airplanes up to give us aerial coverage and assess the damage. the good news is with puerto rico, the system seems to be lifting just a little bit away from them. so as we talked about a little while ago, you see that there s an eye wall then an out
the inner eye wall. and it s contracting in toward the center and normally what that does is it actually weakens the storm briefly. so what you might see overnight is you might see the hurricane bottom out in intensity, maybe even weaken just a few millibars, but then once it completes that eye wall replacement cycle, it s right back to being even stronger than it was before and irma s been pretty amazing because it s gone through about four or five of these cycles over the last few days. incredible to see. i appreciate all the work that you and all your colleagues are doing to keep us informed. richard henning, thank you. thank you. thank you, anderson. much more on hurricane irma shortly. the path of the storm heading toward florida. we ll have an update from puerto rico where they re already seeing effects. up next, though, a political storm. the controversial deal president trump made with democrats and what republicans think of it, next.