from right to left, essentially horizontal rain coming in here now. again, now, we re getting another huge gust of wind as these palm trees start to woo, as these palm trees start to go back and forth. we even occasionally see, i don t know if you can see it, but all the debris from the ground is starting to be picked up into the sky and sort of twirled around in the air. hopefully everybody is off the streets. where i last joined you from is not too far. i can virtually see it from where we re standing right now. and the roads at this point are impassable with all of the palm fronds, the trees down. hopefully not power lines. that is a very big danger with the above ground power lines. the expression you ain t seen nothing yet, , sadly, it coming your way. bill karins is with us at the desk. this storm is asking like
golf course with incredible speed. if that hit you, that would hurt you. between palm fronds and coconuts and other things that are airborne and could become airborne in this storm, hazards are many. that s why we need people, indoors. thank you. mayor siler, ft. lauderdale, thank you so much for being with us. hoping and praying for the best for your community and all communities across florida. our correspondent jolene kent is in ft. lauderdale, give us a bit of a situation report on what s going on outdoors. jolene? reporter: brian, we are soaking wet, a new band has come in. want to show you, we are in front of moonlight diner, a place we have been frequenting. one of the few businesses still open until yesterday in ft. lauderdale after everything shut down. police instituted a curfew until monday morning. i m going to tell you why. because we are getting serious winds. i want to show you this enormous
around marathon, slightly to the south of marathon and then heading up the western side of florida. look at the winds, though, already at 8:18 in the morning. we have 24 hours to go until this may make landfall on the peninsula of florida. the keys are going to get hit before then. it will be dark in the overnight hours when the florida keys get hit by this hurricane. again, ft. lauderdale, florida there are still people standing out there. whether or not they have plans to evacuate we will see. as we look at key west, palm fronds certainly bending. that is very deceiving. key west is right in the path of this storm. so again you see the gray skies. it s going to get horrific by comparison to what we re seeing now. we have another 12 hours for this to pick up steam and intensity as we give you a look at hollywood, florida. surf has increased certainly.
now as far as the damage? well, you know, as you mentioned, we are expecting sunrise to come shortly and hopefully help illuminate some of what we re seeing. all we can see right now is through our headlights. obviously power is out for a number of people in koshus christy. we are seeing a lot of downed palm fronds. we will we have not seen structural damage yet in town. but it s difficult to see these things. sometimes there s damage on the roof and you can t quite see that from the ground level when it is so dark. this is a challenge that city officials are having to deal with, as well. they try to make their way around town. you know, we still do have, at the very least, tropical storm force winds consistently going on right now, kind of rocking the vehicle as we make our way. and so what, you know, this is something that, again, city officials will have to deal with as they try to ascertain exactly what happened here, exactly what
kind of damage we saw from hurricane harvey and these category four winds. because, again, we have been talking about the rain, the potential for flooding, but those are very strong winds. and, of course, what you would expect to find would be some blown out windows or maybe some fruit damage. again, hard to see at this point. have not been able to see that personally, but we do have quite a bit of education, bushes, palm fronds, those obstacles in the roads as you make your way around. mya, what have you been hearing from first responders, from emergency personnel? i know in other communities, slvb reports of fires that may have been started by lightning strikes and other people and residents calling for help. have you heard anything about that or are most people in the community either at shelters or at home hunkered down? most people decided to hunker down here and that s partially because there was not a mandatory evacuation here. it was a voluntary evacuation. there was a fire