is getting people away from immediate danger. and then we will shift into putting our communities back together. bill: roy cooper there, the governor here in north carolina. the word goes out, the warning to so many getting reports now throughout this part of north carolina that roads are under water. trees are down, power is out. so many more affected. griff jenkins atlantic beach. griff has been up long before the sun came up earlier today. what are you getting now? a pretty good punch there. we are as well on the coastline. yeah, you know, bill, this is some of the fiercest winds i ve felt since 2:00 a.m. gusts at 80 to 90 miles an hour. you have a problem now. the sound in morehead beach. we had to get off atlantic beach. here at morehead city, you see the water, the surge spilling
right now it looks like we have just a couple of small issues for damage, roofs here and there, small wall that has collapsed. but other than that, most of it is minor debris, trees and things like that. not very much flooding. we don t have too much in the way of power lines or phone lines in the road but we are completely out of power on the island. so that s about 6,000 residents. bill: you are about on the underbelly of the storm, is that right, michael, the southern end of it? yes, that s correct. bill: do you think there might have been a note of optimism being at that angle when the storm hit land? most definitely. we really haven t to date faced a whole lot of major rain or
myrtle beach is that roughly 5,000 people are without power and that number will climb higher. we re also expecting torrential rain. i m a little wet now but it is only going to get worse because you ll get inland flooding from behind me coming this way. you ve got the ocean behind the camera. you can t see it right now coming this way. we expect to possibly be locked into this area. we re staying safe. we ll have continuous visual throughout the rest of the day. nobody is on the street except one guy that got a flat tire next to us. aside from that completely empty. businesses are boarded up. a bunch of people i spoke to yesterday quickly said they ll try to ride this out because they ve done this successfully in the past. they were here for hurricane hugo and other hurricanes. they believe they got enough supplies and generators, they boarded up their homes. they re capable of riding this
as florence continues to slam the carolina coast knocking out power for more than 500,000 people at this point. that number is expected to continue to go up. south carolina senator tim scott joins us now. senator, you ve been preparing the residents of your state. what so far are you seeing as far as response now that we ve seen this hurricane make landfall? good morning. the response has been positive so far. the question we still have is there is a lot of residents still on the coast that did not leave or could not leave. so it s really important for us to tell those residents to stay put. at this point it s really too late to leave. most areas of the coast of south carolina and so it s really important to stay put. i think there is good news and bad news and the ugly. the good news is it s gone from a cat 4 to cat 1. the bad news is that hurricanes are not wind events only. they re really water events. which means that the impact of
many as three million of the four million customers without power. not just for a day or two but some could go for as long as a week. the importance of this time to prepare cannot be overemphasized. sandra: senator, i know that you were just on social media retweeting to your residents who follow you. areas far from the coast are also a risk of severe flooding and a very important point as we talk about the coastal areas as this storm moves inland, so many more are in danger. one of the things that we oftentimes miss during these events is that we think about the coast as just being those coastal counties. but the inland communities, when the storm sits for as long as it is going to sit, what you ll find is that water flows through the rivers and frankly rivers are a hard place for the water to find a way out. what they ll do is start to