meets the city of tampa. this is an area of hillsboro county that officials expect to flood even as hurricane ian tracks to the south of where we are right now. nearly 400,000 people, nearly 400,000 people across hillsboro county were told they need to get to higher ground. 43 hurricane shelters opened two days ago. i have to tell you, john, in my experience covering storms, it does seem that folks did take these warnings seriously. on our drive from pinellas county yes, sir on my way in, i was able to see one hurricane shelter and it was pretty busy. and a drive around town showed a lot of businesses closed, a lot of them boarded up. gas stations were still open. there was a couple of them that had run out of gas but a number of them just had a short line. it seems like folks did get prepared ahead of whatever impact we were going to get from hurricane ian. over in pinellas county in the
wrote good vibes only, also put down a number of sandbags all in anticipation of what we expect to be a pretty significant flooding. down at the marina, business after business has all of this plywood out. pinellas county where we are now, about a 20 to 25 minute drive from tampa and the county sheriff s office, pinellas county sheriff s office already started to restrict some access to the barrier islands. later this morning they re going to need to show some sort of i.d. and a reason why you re trying to get this far out west, because if you don t have a reason to be there there is already an evacuation order in place for those barrier island. in hillsborough, 43 hurricane shelters opened yesterday and thousands, tens of thousands of sandbags were handed out at three locations that were opened by the city of tampa, and you mentioned in the lead-in out
their hurricane shelters. i know that we did here in the city of key west last night at 5:00. we opened up the key west high school, and that s primarily for the special needs individuals in the city of key west and also we will a situation where we have a number of live-aboards, with the affordable housing crisis people are living on boats and so we were very concerned about them being out on the water in a tropical storm condition. steve: as we look at the swirl of ian, we know it is expected to pass to the west of us. mayor, thank you very much for joining us live and telling us how the people of key west are hunkering down. appreciate that, and our best wishes and prayers go out to the people in central florida and particularly in the tampa area. brian: absolutely. ainsley: thank you so much, mayor. for continuing coverage of hurricane ian, download the fox weather app or stream it on your