morning don t expect to see the worst of it yet. it will just start to be getting windy at 8:00 a.m. when the sun comes up. and then as we go through the day that s when things really start to ramp up. look at this. by 1:00 p.m., there s the eye, so, we re going to be close to a landfall a little after noon, local time here. remember, the western portion, this is right where the time zone changes here, right where it s going to be making landfall. 109-mile-per-hour winds early in the afternoon. so once you get to winds at about 50 to 60, that s when you start losing power. so during the middle of the afternoon there will still be daylight. peopling will be losing power. this is when the destruction will take place. this is also when the worst of the sorm surge will be coming on shore all through north florida. water levels are already up two to three feet just because of the constant wind from the south. there is 5:00 p.m. tallahassee, that could be approximately 3:00 to about 6:00 p.m
in andrew, i had 500 employees without home. we didn t have this amount of wind. andrew was not as big as this is. this is 185-mile-per-hour wind. and they re tracking even higher than that sometimes. it s this has the potential for significant storm surge. we didn t have that in andrew. if you remember last year and it happened in an area where we didn t there were citizens but not like in a major area. we had ten feet of storm surge. that devastated, i mean, it goes in for miles. so, you ve got we have a plan in every community for how if we re going to have a sorm surge how far the water is going to go and that s how they re making their evacuation orders. listen to them. i have a daughter in naples and she lives inland a little bit, but she s listening and she s calling me all the time asking me and i say make sure you listen to your locals. but we have a plan.
the 70-mile-per-hour range along nags head and into cape hatteras. it s pretty relentless. this is a small sampling of what we could see happening up the coastline as we just heard from the national hurricane center. they re not going to waver on the category 1 strength. they expect to keep this as we head into the next 72 hours. alex, right there that s another indication of the storm surge and how far it is moving into portions of the coastline. right there they could have had some motion of that storm surge of about 5 to 10 feet. yeah. it was interesting also before we get to luke russert standing by for us in alexandria. as we listened to bill reed from the national hurricane center, he talked about delaware bay north of dover. greater than 4 foot sorm surge, and eltsd you re going to have significant damage there. that extends to long island and the new york metropolitan area 4
the impact expected to be catastrophic. it s all about which way it goes. devastating sorm surge, life threatening winds, you know the factors. the question is where. we re watching it closely. the storm could hit florida by the weekend. they are declaring a state of emergency. now rushing to stores and lining up at gas stations. joining us now are two americans trapped currently in the hurricane. on the island of go wa da loupe. and she took some video of the storm battering the hotel. with her is her friend rachel. they are on a business trip on the island. ladies, thank you so much for joining us. maybe we can watch your video. what are the conditions like right now? right now, we are in our sixth floor hotel room and we re watching a balcony that just broke off of the room up stairs
most houses intact, but as fema reported earlier, erin, almost every single house damaged in some way. we put the hel kaumeicopter in d near here because this area looked hard hit. this trailer area, this camground, we see trailers blown over. there s an airstream on its side, and we came over to this house that was mostly destroyed. the sorm surge, the storm surge came up about two feet here in this mucky silt is everywhere, much deeper than this in many places. when we got to this house, we found armando, who is here with me now. armando, come here for a sec. armando chose to try to ride out the storm. and you stayed in your house right here until a certain point. but then what happened? after the tree fell down and then the house can t support any more, and then the lift all the roof up. that s when i decided to go in the backside of the house, and then after that, i wait until