forever. steve: that s right. and we should point out, most of the schools have been closed for today and impacted area. one of the impacted areas is hudson, florida. let s take a look and janice was talking about the storm surge and there, ladies and gentlemen, exhibit a. as landfall is now imminent, but, listen, the state of florida has been preparing. we had the governor live from the command center about 45 minutes ago. and he talked about how they have staged generators. they have got over a million gallons of gas staged. they have got star links, which, if people are unable to communicate they have 500 star links they will drop into different communities so people can get the word out if they need help. brian: good job elon musk. greg steube joins us from sarasota where his district is under a storm surge warning nearly a year after being pummeled by hurricane ian.
taking time to get through. to your point about the tornado warning, seeing more active radar with three active warnings with the bands onshore and with the forward speed of this storm, i think the rain bands will wrap up up across northeastern florida, georgia and carolinas and severe weather threat continuing to push northeast, where we re monitoring landfall. and jane, that is important to point out. think about the best analogy is an ice skater, they pull their arm and tighten their spin, that is what this storm will be doing. forward motion increases and bands tighten up and you get more intense winds in the tropical bands. having forward motion pick up, it will be forward hit and it will impact inland areas,
will rapidly intensify. as it moves northward towards landfall. her going for her game. 18,000 folks. on the evacuation zone. way from the storm surge. all that water gets pushed up. we ll run as fast as again. and laskaris nikopol hours. you have the, windiest the rain. the storm surge attrition causing the most fatalities. you touched on a bit.
the storm to push all of that shallow water up into the land. so obviously the winds are quite dangerous, but the storm surge, the span of the storm surge is much broader, a much larger area, so you might have the eye itself is not typically large, but the impact of the surge goes well south of where that eye will impact the shoreline. i want to ask you with your reporter/journalist hat on here in the past storms you ve covered and the perspective you ve brought from past storms and looking at this one, through what lens are you are you looking at idalia, and how are you seeing it now? as it approaches a few hours away now from that making landfall? it s really, you know, the atlantic basin has become so much more active in the last two weeks, over the last 14 days or
category three. it is not, it is still category two. one mile an hour difference then being category three. 1:10 miles an hour. moving towards the north. 60 miles per hour. we ve got our attention is that it is moving at 60 miles an hour. it is slowing down. that is not good news. we ve watched this going from just being a massive thunderstorm to having a clearly defined i. and the more clearly we can see the, i am more tells us that it s ramping up. becoming a mature hurricane. now positioning of a few miles to the south of cedar key. it is on task to move to that big ben area. we will make landfall? merrill the eye cross land? well as we all know it is just not that one point. it is the entire area. because this hurricane is so broad. it s still impacting tampa. still impacting naples florida. coral gables florida. with heavy rainfall.