into charleston. savanna 5.7 feet higher than average. charleston, 4.7 feet above high tide values. that is a significant concern, life threatening concern for that area. that is something to be something that people need to take seriously as we go forward in time. look at the amount of rainfall being produced from this storm. our computer models doing a great job depicting that dark shading of purple and shades of white that s approaching the upper echelon of our scale. 20 inches of rain available locally from there. flooding is a major concern. absolutely. 20 inches. can you imagine? derek thanks so must have. we ll check in with you a little bit later as well. funny you should mention savanna and charleston. that s where we find stephanie elam and brian todd. stephanie, in savanna, let s go to you first.
ago by a spanish admiral. the oldest american city they like to call it. what they had here was an eight foot storm surge. where i m standing now, the water was up around mid calf let me it is a now gone, it s gron the main part of the city as well. which is good news. but when the storm surge was on its way the mayor here put out an evacuation order for the 13,5,000 citizens. only half of them acknowledged it. they had to go through the flooding. they were stuck quite a while. the city was closed down, emergency services weren t running. fortunately, no one was hurt, which is a good thing. but it goes to show the importance of following through an those evacuation orders. electricity is still a major problem in the state of florida. around a million people still without power at last count. when we were drying up from melbourne to here we did see a
it s northerly direction we do anticipate a land falling hurricane remember, that is defined and characterized by the national hurricane center as the eye wall actually traversing across lands. that actually hasn t happened just yet. you can see we are referee three to six hours away from a land falling hurricane in southern sections of south carolina. specifically hillton head and into the booford region. here s charleston and mount pleasant. remember they had significant flooding a year from joaquin. they have had a rough go over the last several months cleaning up from that. this will likely be a significant concern for them. flash floods and warnings extend it was north carolina as well as a significant amount of rain will be dropped from the system going forward over the next several days. here s a look at the current storm surge across savanna and
and that is to make sure that no one takes advantage of all of these empty homes and is looting. so first responders will return to the street once it s safe, so that is a big concern and something they have been thinking about, but otherwise, wands of rain have been coming but here. stephanie, thank you so much. brian todd, you re in charleston, which is a beautiful historic city in the u.s. which also happens to get some flooding problems and a heavy shower of rain let alone a hurricane. reporter: that is right, michael, and the flooding has already started in parts of the greatest charleston area. and the wind now kicking up significantly. always a good barometer. as we get another gust right here, always a good barometer of how strong the winds are in a hurricane is how much the palm trees are swaying in the wind
head island, just north of savannah. and again, the storm surge threat very high across the charleston region where flash flood warnings increase across the state. and attethe big threat here, st surge, also flooding. look at our computer models depicting anywhere between ten and 20 inches of rainfall in an already very wet environment. you know what that means michael when we start to have a saturated ground like this and get hurricane-force winds it will be easy to topple over trees and electrical posts. so we believe that a million plus customers will definitely go up. a couple of hours ago, still at 1.1 million in florida alone. so there is going to be power losses yet. in florida, they re trying to repair it as quickly as they can. when we were driving up from melbourne to here in st. augustine we saw a lot of