way, farther west as steve has been telling us. this is the inherent weakness of the coastline all across florida. you can see where it s most weak when it comes to storm surge, it s mostly on this side of the state. that s why this is so concerning when you re looking at how it is now tracking this way. now, when we look at how a storm surge actually does look, this is an animation from the national hurricane sender and they laid it out. this might be a levy or storm surge barrier. then as the surge starts to come in, the bulges of water is what they re measuring over what the normal tide might be. it destroys a levy over a period of time and takes away the vegetation and then you see this house will be gone over certain amount of time and then this gets dug, this gets dug a little deeper, vegetation gone, two feet of surge can sweep away suvs and pickups. six inches can knock a person
everything that was outside, all the chairs is in the living room. you are a prepared woman. penny, we wish you the best of luck getting through all this. you ve been through this a few times. thanks so much. we talk about the wind, the rain, extremely dangerous but it s the storm surge that officials continue to warn people about. they re saying wind is not the killer. they re saying storm surge, as you were emphasizing there, that s the tropical storm killer. right here if you look at this over 50% or almost 50% is caused by the surge. that is what they re looking at when you look at just wind, then wind is at 8% in terms of surge. now, that s just in the last half century when we look at numbers. in addition to that, i ll show you this map here of irma as it moved directions in the last 24 hours. the issue is it s tacked this
it s so fluffy! look at that fluffy unicorn! he s so fluffy i m gonna die! your voice is awesome. the x1 voice remote. xfinity. the future of awesome. 16 past the hour back here on msnbc live tracking hurricane irma for you. here is the very latest. irma s storm surge has begun to impact key west. the national weather service says the water level is two feet
of thousands of people without power. absolutely in marathon, that s a scary place to be right now. florida city also a scary place to be, but certainly not as fierce as marathon, but still pretty fierce in its own right. you look just at the trees that things are being blown around. there s all kinds of debris. then i ve been looking across u.s. 1, if you look with me, you might be able to see it a stop sign just kind of spinning around like a toy, flopping back and forth. one side is a stop sign, one side is a do not enter sign. every time the wind kicks up there. whoa. i don t know if you saw it. we had another green flash. as far as i can tell on the east side where we are of u.s. 1 things have gone out. only emergency lights here now. on the west side it appears they still have power. in fact, if you look at this stoplight, this stoplight still on. to theouth of us, that s where it s changing to total darkness now. street lights are out.
massive storm is penny landow in plantation, florida, just west of ft. lauderdale. what are you seeing on plantation? i know we ve had our cameras up in ft. lauderdale just a short distance from you and the rain is pounding as are the winds as we give our viewers a live look at ft. lauderdale. how about where you are? caller: well, that s pretty much what we have here, alex. it goes through periods where there s a lot of rain and a lot of winds and we had thunder and lightning. i m sure you know a tornado touched down not far from where we were earlier. we knew there were warnings. you can say i know it was in carl springs or something like that. but we were getting a lot of rain and lot of wind. then it will stop. you ll think, oh, this is nice, it s going to go away. ten minutes later again comes the rain and the wind and