swift boats, all ready to move in and begin to go door-to-door when it is clear enough to be able to do so. power outages have slammed half a million. that is the latest number that we have over the course of this hour that we re now in. floridians on the ground as ian barrels towards their homes, their businesses. we have people all across the state with updates about different sections of the state, what it feels like, what s going on there. fox team coverage with all of our great weather team out there spread across the state as well. we begin with katie burn who is in orlando. katie, what can you tell us from where you are? all right. let s go to max gordon first. max is in tampa bay. max, tell us what you re seeing where you are. hi, martha. so we ve been hearing a lot about the storm surge concerns in the fort myers area. but up here where we are on the north end of the storm, we ve seen an erie sight along old tampa bay. we ve seen what is known as reverse storm surg
during until the winds die down below 40. this is the worst of it the last hour or so here where i m standing. we re seeing bits of buildings fly off. there s a marina over there to my left. you can hear these boats being crunched. i had something smash into my windshield before. it s debris right now. the danger of debris and the flooding and the storm surge will come in the next few hours also. martha, back to you. yes, steve. thanks very much. steve said palm trees, some of them starting to snap. you can see we re probably at the height of the wind in the area where steve is. steve is a veteran hurricane reporter. he has been through a lot of these. but this one is incredibly forceful and incredibly large as a category four landfall storm that we are watching play out
quickly this storm grew and how quickly it moved. did that give enough folks on the ground time to prepare or get out? preparation really was flat footed. people thought that a category two was coming and they didn t do what they normally would do with a category four or five. this really tells the story here. we re at a marina here. this is called legendary marinm. you can see the damage created by the storm. oh my goodness. reporter: it s amazing. when you look at the rotation of the hurricane winds, this is actually coming off of the intracoastal waterway as opposed to coming in from shore. they did get a little bit of an early assessment because the storm passed through along the
have the power crews coming in. they ve got more than 5,000 linemen that are going to be out trying to restore power in the affected areas. that takes time. you have to remove downed trees, reset poles, get the lines up. if you are somewhere else because you did evacuate, you probably want to take a day or so before you really assess coming back. just on panama city beach, people stayed put. they re waking up without power. there are no reports from the fire department that there were any serious injuries during the storm, but they did say their phones were ringing off the hook with people calling asking for help. we gave you a mandatory evacuation. you can t call us in the middle of the storm and say help. you were almost blown away. glad you re standing up right and safe and sound this morning. reporter: thank you.
tallahassee has so many treats. is this a scene that you see repeated there in tallahassee, lots of downed trees with power line issues? or did they really dodge a bullet, comparatively speaking? reporter: we were driving around the city this morning. we ve seen scenes similar to this one. but really considering the magnitude of this storm, this was a historic hurricane. the city of tallahassee released its first ever extreme wind warning yesterday. consider the magnitude, this kind of damage is quite rare here. people are saying they really did dodge a bullet. as hurricane michael slammed the florida panhandle, both republicans and democrats broke with the once considered taboo tradition of running negative