country. we should note that most of the u.s. diplomats in afghanistan left less than two weeks ago when the u.s. embassy was completely evacuated. so the remaining contingent are a smaller number. they ve been helping as the visas have come in through the gates. the diplomats can t stay there if there s no operating airport. a senior official said those things related. earlier this week when talking about what was going to happen to the diplomatic presence saying it s unlikely you would keep u.s. diplomats in a country where there s no way to get out by air or sea. of course, given that afghanistan is a land-locked country. is it clear to you what would happen to the u.s. embassy? i mean, is it possible that depending on what kind of rule the taliban actually ends up having that the u.s. could reopen an embassy? it is possible.
bill, for chuck making their way down from key largo, he is saying there s still heavy winds over there. they re still going to get gusts throughout it the evening probably up to 50 miles an hour. this is the population area and this is the airport here. we haven t really heard about all the bridges that connect. what s accessible yet and what s not. they re cutting their way through. chuck, have you gotten to any bridges yet? yeah. listen, this is a really important point, ali. thank you for bringing it up. there s a lot of information that gets flown out there. some of it is accurate, some is inaccurate. there s been numerous reports that there s been bridges out. however, we ve already confirmed that one bridge isn t. and so we want to be real careful what we push out about the brijdges. right now our intent is to get to marathon and put eyes on every single bridge and check along the way so we can get accurate information back to our emergency manager who s in the temporary e
than 24 hours ago it is tonight there will be craft coming in, airplanes from southwest, airtran and delta, all flying in to get ready for flights tomorrow morning. the place is not exactly the way it was before the tornado ripped through. but, the airline director here says, she will take it. we are not going to have the prettiest airport tomorrow. but we will have an operating airport and that is a goodning for us. reporter: operations begin tomorrow morning with the first plates going off about 6:00 tomorrow morning. they will they will not be fully operational. it will be something of a restricted schedule while they work out the kinks. there s a number of things that aren t perfect. at least lambert will be back online tomorrow. rick: good news. what about the concourse that suffered the most damage? what about that concourse? when is that going to reopen? what about the flights that
this morning. we were talking right before the eye had passed and we lost service and they had a really good plan because they knew we anticipated it would take us some time to get there. and they had a plan to start getting to the airport and working on the airport to get help to folks. all right. and how many people do you think stayed in marathon? we don t have a good calculation. if i had to guess, i would say maybe 10% of the community remained. it was really hard to tell. we had a really robust evacuation plan. we notified folks very, very early and we know that we ve got a lot of people evacuated. we were very, very happy about that, but i don t really have a good number on who stayed. chuck, tell me what the plan is. you want to get that airplane open. is that so that you can get fixed-wing aircraft in or you want to get helicopters in? i m showing our viewers right now on the screen, i ll show them where this airport is but you have an operating airport there. you don