thank you for being with us this morning. my pleasure, john. thanks for helping us get the message out. the rain bands passing through but you keep hearing these warnings and the superlatives now, the agreement superlatives as the storm approaches with winds of 155 mimes. miles per hour. hurricane ian barrelling towards florida. st. petersburg one of the many cities in its path. we ll be speaking to the mayor next. plus this as russians are trying to escape the country to avoid vadladimir putin s draft, there is an urgent warning to americans in russia, leave immediately. this is cnn s special live
storm surge and certainly the wind could take them down. the charlotte harbor is where this peace river feeds into and that is where hurricane charlie hit right at the charlotte harbor. i don t know, what would you expect would be happening in the harbor if we re seeing this kind of a storm of this magnitude. when the wind is going to be blowing from the west from 140 to 155 possibly, all of that water will get pushed up into that river. you can get a funnel effect where some of those numbers could be higher right up the river, right up the stream. that s what i m concerned about, especially if there s someone actually staying on those boats out there. that s something that you need to be gone. but the whole idea here is that charlie, every talks about charlie. this isn t charlie. this is closer to katrina. this is a storm surge of
evacuation orders but it s your decision to leave. a lot of people have heeded those warnings but we ll see how it will affect people who have stayed. officials telling people in the area during the height of the storm, they ve got to conserve water, asking you not to run your dishwasher, your laundry machine, limit flushing and showering if you can because they had issues with the sewage system here in st. petersburg. in 2015, 2016 they had some 200 million gallons of sewage water pour into aquifers and other ware spaces because the system couldn t hold up. this will be a test as to whether the system can hold up. we re expecting pretty significant flooding in the area in the coming hours.
communities could take quite some time if people are still there and they did remain there for the storm, right? yeah. i know of people who actually rode it out in a boat. he made it through, i don t know how. he has scary stories to talk about. i hope people get off those boats and get up on higher land. chad and randi, stand by. randi, you and your team stand by safely somewhere for the next several minutes or several hours. i want to bring in the mayor of tampa so people can see the situation here in tampa, even though nothing anything what rani is seeing in punta gorda is beginning to deteriorate. our concern is still the
currently located now. this storm hasn t weakened just yet even though we ve had increate mental decreases in the wind. i m still feeling maximum, maximum hurricane force, the violent waves of energy that continue to come through here. i mean, if i can summarize it, this is the best way i can do it. i have a 4-year-old son that loves car washes. this reminds me of walking through a car wash or literally driving through your car wash and rolling your windows down. my son would understand that comparison but literally, it s just spraying you in the face almost stinging as it does and i can t imagine anyone who decided to ride this out, what they must be thinking at this moment in time. my producer has friends in the area here, closer to ft. myers that decided to ride the storm out and in my mind, i was thinking, jake, you know, if there is one family who decided