an eerie calm in coastal florida as dorian inches closer. tolls have now been suspended on the state s major highways to assist evacuation efforts. evacuation orders in effect for palm beach, martin, saint lucy, ri vard, indian rifr, volusia, martin county sheriffs warning a near miss or devastation are both possibilities. we are within 20 miles of an apocalyptic hurricane coming ashore on the treasure coast. if it does what the models are predicting, we will be okay. if, on the other hand, the storm wobbles 20 miles to 30 miles off its current path, and that s not a lot, we will have landfall. steady stream of power trucks arriving in florida. they are being stationed all over the state. at noon today orlando, melbourne, ft. lauderdale will
and as al has been saying whether it wobbles just to the we re or stays to the east. but right now we are just starting to see the wind kick up and those extreme outer bands. just start to rake the florida east coast here. stay safe as always. and you re right about that as i was walking up, al, as i was driving up on saturday i was in orlando, i went up to savannah and you saw those power trucks ready to go. but you covered this for long enough to know that a lot of these storms do unexpected things. i would almost say most of them do unexpected things. they do at lease at some point. this one has been frusz very frustrating in that it has taken its sweet time. i can t remember a storm crawling at this pace. since the 5:00 update 5:00 a.m., it s gone about ten miles. that s nothing. so it s kind of interesting. as we look at the radar, you can see we ve got the hurricane
until after the storm. and we are seeing 24 to 36 hours of tropical storm force winds in a single area. the outages will be longer than normally. i just saw a report from somebody heading north out of florida that power trucks are starting to they re seeing them on the other side of the highway going south toward florida. this is always tricky. because that storm we don t know where it goes after it goes to florida with whether it hits further north into georgia. how does staging work when- for things like supplies, things like power trucks, the khmerry pickers? how do you think about that when you don t know where the storm is going? well, utility companies do a terrific job on trying to understand where they have places they can put the vehicles near going to be safe. they have teams of meteorologists on call. and they ll find the locations that try to get them out of the areas of greatest impact and allow them to get as quickly as possible. the mutual aid system crass the powe
here. it spread out over the area. he said he heard a rumbling that drew him to the door. he saw this ef-4 coming with winds of 170 miles per hour. you see here the frame of the trailer just tossed against the tree like silly string. i want you to listen to his girlfriend jessica chandler explain his injuries and what happened. i had just left and went to the grocery store with my kids to get my baby formula. he heard loud noises, walked to the screen door and he seen the porch fly up. it was like a patio. he said he had just enough time to dive to the couch which the couch is about a foot away from the screen door. he just held onto the couch for dear life. he was thrown to the trees, fractured his leg. he s been released from the hospital. the good news is we see the power trucks are back in town.
let me take you there. this is the tin roof that s been thrown across 100, wrapped around the trees here. and the winds here so strong that just from looking at the pictures preliminarily, the national weather service says this appears to be an ef-3 meaning winds at 136 miles per hour. maybe up to 165. we ll tell you what we re not seeing, debris in the road. that s because crews worked all evening, as late as they could without power here, to clear the roads. we ve seen dozers being brought in. the power trucks will be here. the search and rescue efforts continue as well. let me take you to the other side of this home as well so you can see just how destructive this tornado was. this is the linoleum of the kitchen floor. you can see here as well. the padding in the carpet from the living room area. and what we did not see, if my photographer can follow me here, when we got here at about 2:00 a.m. was, because there was