underwater, mr. mayor? not at present time. it may be before the day is ove over. shepard: there is breaking news now on fox news channel. the hurricane has just officially made landfall north and west of mexico beach between tyndall air force base and mexico beach. that means the center of circulation crossed over the land within the last 2-3 minutes. and it did so with maximum sustained winds, 155 miles per hour. in 30 years of covering hurricanes firsthand and on the ground, i ve never experienced storm that when it actually made landfall, the eye of the winds of 155 miles an hour.
welcome back to early start. i m john berman. i m christine romans. big morning here. 30 minutes past the hour. breaking news. you want to pay attention to this. a deadly hurricane is getting close to florida and other southeastern states. hurricane matthew is a category three storm. it killed 15 people in the caribbean. it is tearing through the bahamas. a harrowing night in the bahamas. this is expected to gain strength and regain category four status. it is expected to make landfall north of miami up to north carolina. that means millions of people right now are under voluntary or mandatory evacuation orders across a wide area. we re talking the entire city of st. augustine put under mandatory evacuation. some places, gas has run out. long lines of people stocking up because they decided to ride it
with the supplies, especially with the pattern. our category 1 storm. it lingers here. we still have at least four days before it even gets close to areas of eastern north carolina or virginia. it does this little button hook out here. this is saturday. notice it accelerates quickly northwards over the weekend. the hurricane center, this was the 5:00 a.m. path. we ll get the new path in about an hour and a half from now. the next one i bet will shift closer to the coast. going from a strong cat 2 to a medium cat 2 to a strong cat 1 as it nears land areas in the mid-atlantic. there is excellent agreement with most of the computer models. they re heading towards areas east of north carolina or mid-atlantic. no direct impacts up into new england. the one computer model that disagrees with that just happens to be our most reliable long-range model, the european. i ll show you that in a second. here is our american gfs model. landfall north of cape hatteras, south of virginia beach. a devas
are surviving in the open now in the wake of the storm. the philippines military is leading the operations to bring food and medical supplies to them, but they re faces difficulties coping with enormity of the disaster. there has been reports of looting as people struggle to find food. philippine interior secretary who viewed the disaster area by helicopter says the scale of the relief operation now needed is overwhelming. an international effort is now gearing up to help the philippines. u.s. defense secretary chuck hagel says they have made available helicopters, aircraft and search equipment to help the relief effort. typhoon haiyan is now bearing down on vietnam. a massive operation to evacuate the coast there is under way. it s now believed to have changed direction slightly and may make landfall north of the capital, hanoi. but it is weakening now, and hopefully won t cause so much devastation in vietnam.
up next, jeremy peters is joining us for the other big stories of the morning. ben bernanke in the news in a big way, but first here s bill karins with a check on the forecast. good morning to everyone on this last day of spring. we officially welcome in summer a couple minutes after midnight tonight on the east coast. this story out there so far, this late spring season, has been the fires. they have been horrible out there in colorado and areas of arizona, new mexico. we have a high fire danger day today. red flag warnings everywhere in red. we have 19 large incident fires burning on the map right now. so this is just an area where it will be very, very dangerous. also, tropical storm barry is now making landfall north of vera cruz, mexico. it became the b-name yesterday. it will die off today. the troublesome weather is already in the northern plains just south of fargo. and later on this afternoon, minneapolis to omaha, watch out for strong storms. everyone on the east coast on t