like a freight train. we re seeing record-breaking and terrifying storm surges throughout florida and ft. myers, the water is so high pickup trucks are almost completely submerged. water levels have risen more than 6 feet in the last switch ho seven hours. let s get to tom sater in the cnn weather center. an updated forecast should come any minute now. what should we expect? it was just handed to me. forgive me for reading off. we still have a category 4 hurricane and five miles east of punta gorda. it will stay at hurricane strength through orlando. this will rake the entire peninsula. we had grove city a gust of 128. when we talk about the southern kind here, a better picture on radar will give an indication what we re looking at. here is the new track. keeps it as a 4 of course now moving inland but notice it s a category one. it will lose strength now that it s interacting with a land mass. that s typical. however, the winds have expanded now as these storms do. in fa
i fear the pictures from naples and st. myers. it will be a saddening scene tomorrow. this band 10 inches of rain will lift northward as the storm lifts and that s where the converging sets in, jake, and that s where the heavy rain sets in. however, it s not over with. i told you how much rain they ve had in the last couple weeks, the ground is completely saturated. the soil type in florida is only absorb so much. water runs quickly across it. we re getting good wind gusts. i just mentioned the 120. here is the problem. the root systems of trees are going to be extremely weak and saturated with rain and more rain to come. you toss this band of rainfall on that area and then you toss a swath of tropical storm forced winds well over 350 miles, you re going to have tens and tens and tens of thousands of trees down, downing power lines. we got over a million without power now. that s just the beginning. water rescues, power outages across the entire peninsula of florida. as a meteorologist
we are providing a lot of support that is staged and ready to go. we have almost 250 aircraft, more than 1600 high water vehicles and more than 300 boats of all drafts and sizes including 250 already stationed in the major impacted areas and nearly 50 that are staged and immediately ready to come in. so with water this high, you know, these operations may need to be water born operations. now, there are somewhere you re going to need to use the water to get to barrier islands anyways. so look at collier county, downtown naples is flooded. that s probably going to subside as the time goes on but they re prepared for a lot of different eventu eventualities. so we re thankful for the starts that sent us resources and we re very, very appreciative of them stepping up and helping florida. as this storm passes your community, understand it s still a very hazardous situation. you re going to have downed
rainfall. that trough is sending winds from the north at the surface. irma s winds at the surface are moving northward. where they both converge from around the tampa st. pete area to lakeland toward orlando, that conversion causes the air to rise to squeeze out much, much more in the way of rainfall. take the landfall of ian out of the equation and we ve got ourselves one to two feet of rain. rainfall rates at two to three inches an hour after hour after hour. no community can with stand that. considering how far away so many communities are at the north, we ll have 911 calls, numerous of them. you can start to see radar estimates right now over ten inches right now north of ft. myers. the worst surge is down to the south where you get to around naples. the surge we believe got as high as seven feet in naples until the monitoring equipment went dead. it s much higher than that.