There are a lot of moving parts still. we ll likely get a better idea from governor desantis whether or not those mandatory evacuation orders are going to be expanded further south. we re getting reports that may already be happening as we speak. absolutely a storm that you want to make sure you move for. the challenge is according to the attorney general, convincing those who have lived in the state for quite some time that this is not a storm to take lightly. they need to evacuate no matter how long they ve lived here or other storms they have seen in their lifetime. bill: rely on you a lot in the coming days. dana: janice dean is tracking ian s path reporting from fox weather the hurricane headquarters. you talked about a storm of the century back then in the tampa bay area there was about 50,000 people that lived there and now 100 years later close to 400,000 people. so we re talking about a storm of a lifetime and if it does move over the tampa bay area it
Counties who worked very hard to execute their plans. kevin will talk a little bit more from the de mperspective but we have had 500 requests for assistance from our counties. the state has fulfilled 466. some others are on the way and some will be fulfilled. they just can t be fulfilled until the storm actually hits. we mentioned sending medical professionals to hillsborough county special needs shelters and another 120 to surrounding counties. we do have our logistical staging area in polk county and we ll have additional staging later today. 300 ambulances supporting special needs evacuations have been deployed. hundreds of generators and pumps staged in the tampa area and pre-landfall food and water has been stageed for tampa bay region. now as the track has moved a little bit more to where you have potentially greater
Is not about the heavy rainfall. even the small core of winds of over 100 miles per hour they can withstand it. it is the storm surge. ten feet of storm surge going over one of the most vulnerable coastlines on the planet will be devastating and potentially deadly and why ron desantis will say if you live in the tampa bay area you need to take this very seriously. a storm that is still strengthening. these are the milli bars. consistently rapidly intensifying even over cuba. we have all this warm water the storm will travel over in the next 12 to 24 hours and bill and dana if i can stress this. the storm will slow down. we ll deal with perhaps 48 hours of battering storm surge, hurricane-force winds and two feet of rainfall that adds salt to the wound for this very
Impacts, we knew you would get storm surge all along. just the nature of a storm this big. however, kevin will be mobileizing more resources to be able to assist those counties in the southwest portion of the state of florida. again, go to florida disaster .org/get a plan to make sure that you have what you need. you still have time today to execute what you need to do. if you re in an evacuation zone you have time to be able to heed those orders. if you re not, you have time to be able to get whatever supplies that you may need to deal with what is going to happen over the next few days. i would just tell all floridians who are in the path of this, there will be interruptions in things like power, fuel, maybe interruptions in communication. that is to be expected. just plan for that and all these resources are mobilized to try to restore the services as quickly as possible once it is safe to do so.
They re great people, beautiful state. you know about their football team? bill: a little bit. dana: governor desantis will give a update any moment now and bring it live. florida is bracing for what could be a once in a century storm. bill: the current storm track shows landfall sometime on thursday, maybe in tampa. if that were a direct hit, it would be the first major storm to hit tampa in more than 100 years. dana: forecasters are predicting storm sturge. people are boarding up homes and businesses. the amount of water may simply be too much to overcome. bill: here is what we know. governor desantis declared a state of emergency. tampa s international airport will shut down at 5:00 east coast time. dana: evacuation orders affecting hundreds of thousands of people. folks there say supplies are running low. shelves are totally empty.