ocean. that river could also experience storm surge and flood a good portion of low lying areas of this city and depending on how bad it is, even higher portions. you have all the rain coming down today and into the weekend. that remains a major concern. you look at what happened in new bern. it s a similar situation. it is on a river. it really got hit with the storm surge early and they ve had to rescue about 150 people there in new bern. people in jacksonville have a similar situation. they are also on a river that has ties to the ocean. the good news is jacksonville had voluntary evacuations a couple of days ago and the rest of the county had mandatory evacuations. a lot of people have moved out of here or at least on higher ground. we spoke with one woman who told us she s at the fire department with her family. the reasons people straay, mh
record all the way through wednesday. that means roads washed out, homes with water and people evacuated because of the river all the way into the middle of next week. that s crazy. 72 into next week. wilmington, 72 miles per hour. the wilmington area, stay in your homes over the next three or four hours of strongest winds and you will experience as we are watching the eye making land fall. we ll check back in with you. there are people waking up and finding out the situation there as hurricane florence makes way. let s turn to marianne atencio. give us the update there. reporter: these trees, i don t know if you can make that out, we are starting to sway much more of the oak trees.
now to the low tide. that should be the red dotted line. it s all the way up here. that s because the winds are out of the south and the water levels are already running about two feet higher than they re supposed to. right now is supposed to be the low tide. the next six hours we head toward this high tide which they had predicted at 6.8. i ve got a funny feeling this is going to be much higher than this because the winds are still out of the south. that will be one of the things to watch, to see if the next high tide is worse than what we had at midnight. this river forecast, this is the northeast cape fear river, this is a little bit oh the northetot of the wilmington area. this shows you the river heights. this is the record, 22.5. that was hurricane floyd. we passed the record as we go through sunday night. then we say ttay two feet above
issue. every now and then a very strong gust picks up. we can tell you nearly 300,000 people in north carolina have lost power. we actually lost power at 9:00 last night before the winds were even remotely this bad. that should tell you how easily one can lose power. the storm is only going to pick up and get worse as it moves throughout carolina here. we also know that there is a report of a hotel here in jacksonville that had to be evacuated last night out of a sense of precaution, about 70 people evacuated. they were concerned about the structural integrity of that hotel. so those people were taken to a safer place. right now the concern is to get through the wind and heavy rain that s going on right now as the hurricane makes its way toward landfall. after that, the concern in communities like this, not just on the coast but inland, is going to be the flooding. jacksonville, for example, is actually right along a river. you take it about 20 miles down the road, then you re in the
this storm has doubled in soyuz and slowed down. let s go to cnn s new day anchor john berman. john, you re right there in northeast cape fear river in wilmington, north carolina. the eye of the storm could go right over you. reporter: that s right. could pass right over us sometime tomorrow, but winds have already started. the bands are already passing over wilmington. we can field the wind gusting, and you can see i m soaked already. one of the major concerns here, it s a double concern, it s the storm surge that could come up the cape fear river, the northeast cape fear river from the coast and then the flooding, the 12 to 24 maybe higher inches of rain expected in this area over the next several days. they are expecting the cape fear river to reach 22 feet. that s 10 feet higher than it is right now. we ve been speaking to the rivermaster of the cape fear river, and he tells us all kinds of stories that just send a chill town your spine. there are had a goons west of