lines are still hot and live. there s going to be people working to remedy that, and we ve got a lot of people staged. but that is very hazardous in the immediate aftermath of the storm. we currently have 54,000 households that are out of power throughout the state of florida, but there have been over 100,000 households that have already been restored through hard work all through the night, and those restoration efforts are ongoing any place it s safe to do, people are there working to get that done. as soon as it s safe to do so when the winds die down to a sufficient level search and rescue efforts will begin. we have eight urban search and rescue teams staged ready to go, 33 ambulance strike teams, 5,500 national guardsmen. we also have the coast guard on stand by should that be necessary.
and power lines that it became hard to navigate around this city. we expect that to be the case again now because a lot of these, of course the ground underneath the trees getting saturated, that means these trees are going to be vulnerable. when the wind starts to kick up, we know it s coming here in tallahassee soon, when that kicks up everybody here has to be very careful. nobody should be out trying to navigate these roads. we did hear, our team about an hour and 15 minutes ago, we heard first responders and sirens, that s not the case in the next couple of hours. as we ve been told up and down this region, once the winds get to roughly a little over 50 miles an hour, the first responders, as much as they want to and they may try to are not going to be able to move around to try to rescue you. but they do have rescue teams at the ready here in tallahassee and elsewhere. we pulled in late last night from the sount of st. marks, about 20 miles south of here, right here the apppalache
soon as we know we re going to take you back to him right now. we have the feed back. please do not run that generator inside your home or inside your garage, it must be run outside your house, needs to be at least 20 feet away from doors and windows, and you have to point the exhaust away from your home. we do not want to see any fatalities as a result of misuse of generators. so there s a lot of people that are on deck right now, there s going to be a lot of efforts as this storm passes, but this thing is hitting really within the next hour and a half most likely. it s going to make landfall, it is a major hurricane as we ve been saying it was likely to be for the last couple days. we just hope everybody stays safe, don t put your life at risk by doing anything dumb at this point. this thing s powerful. if you re inside, just hunker down until it gets past you. you don t want to be messing around with these winds. there s going to be things flying all over the place.
so, my point being that you don t have to be so close to the center of the storm with the strongest winds to get the greatest impacts. let this scene speak for itself, right, we ve got flashing lights behind us. tampa is behind me. this is bay shore boulevard, and we are getting these intermittent powerful feeder bands from the hurricane. again, we re 125 miles away. that is an angry tampa bay, and this storm surge, three things working in conjunction with each other to have this rising water that we ve seen all morning that s forced us to move our crew vehicles. we have not only a hurricane pushing up the water from the shallow overheated gulf of mexico, but it s working in unison with a super moon which has a greater impact, a greater tug, per se, on the tidal swings exaggerating high tide, which we are just coming from this morning and inland flooding from these rain bands that come that have come through
manatees. right now they should be gone. people should have evacuated. this entire town of about 3,400 people is in a flood zone. i want to let you see. this gives you an idea of how strong these winds are, and how much rain is coming up. you are seeing it hit the it s coming out of the roof there, and coming down, but you are seeing these just bands of rain being whipped about by the winds. i m going to have adoll foe turn towards where the water is, the water is starting to be pushed up. this is the fear, the water is a couple hundred yards from us, it s starting to be pushed onshore, it s not just about the rain, it s about the storm surge, having all that water being pushed on shore, we are talking about six to nine feet of storm surge here, which means that this entire town is going to see some semblance of water. the most they ve ever seen is four feet of storm surge.