ready to respond and do rapid needs assessments, and other teams that are ready to do technical search and rescue to the areas that may be the hardest hit. you know, even when there is a mandatory evacuation, people are going to make their own individual choices, and there will be residents who did not heed the warning at the order to evacuate. what is your message to them, tonight? you know, hopefully you are in an area where, you know, we don t get hit as hard as predicted? we are still in a 4 to 7 foot storm surge potential. there is a point where fire rescue and law enforcement can t respond if sustained winds are at a certain level. so, we have to kind of stand by and quickly after those winds subside, sent those teams out. we ramped up our staffing at our fire stations, so we doubled down on the normal amount of people that would be
storm continues to pull into the big bend coastline and cedar key is interesting, we haven t seen impact of full force of wind onshore pushing to cedar key yet. the wind direction is mostly parallel to the coast line, have not had that true push of water perpendicular to the coast that will lead to the devastating surge. we ve been watching the camera, the cadillac is our measuring stick and nou water up to the bumper. left side of the screen is weather instrumentation we installed and we are washing pressure drop and wind rise. this map is storm surge potential, the reason worst case scenario, you see a lot of red on the screen. that will pop up in just a moment, not everywhere will see
eventually north-northeast is expected to happen in the next couple of hours. ian: if you to want welcome folks, what we continue to track what is now major hurricane idalia. if you re watching us here on fox weather, if you re watching us during the overnight hours on fox news and on a number of fox affiliates across the country, we re here because we re tracking a very dangerous scenario, a major hurricane in a portion of the florida coastline that almost never seas storms like this sees storms like this, especially when in the summertime proper still this is an overnight scenario would that make a lot more sense if it was october. jane: and this storm nvery vulnerable spots along the florida coastline. you hit the big bend here and you have the storm surge potential that s so incredible, up to 16 feet in the worst case scenario and as we continue in time with the slower movement, the strengthening of the storm could that look more and more
these could happen quickly and go away just as quickly and they re very difficult to spot on doppler radar. that is a concern. for that reason, this entire area from southwest florida up through all of tampa bay over through the i-4 corridor and up into the big bend, the nature coast, i-75 corridor up through florida s horse country there in ocala, a tornado watch that runs until 6:00 a.m. let s get back to that storm surge threat, because that is unfortunately what is always the most destructive, the most deadly aspect of tropical systems. it is the saltwater flooding, the surge at the coast line. about half of all lives that are lost, jane, in the tropical events is because of storm surge. jane: up to 16 feet of the storm surge on the nature coast near the big bend. unprecedented. the storm surge potential is immense. how far inland it goes, too, is the bigger danger.
county now. one of my colonels that works in the agencies on the west side of the county is sending us photos we are sharing on facebook feed and sending a lot of folks out along u.s. 19 corridor, which is flood zone a in citrus county. a mandatory evacuation zone. while we didn t experience the high winds we would typically get as a storm passes by. the significant nature of this storm that was a category 2 late last night and become a category 3 and worked its way to category 4 a few hours ago before it made landfall up in the big bend area will bring a lot of storm surge potential for us. we re working towards low tide and we ve got very unseasonably high tides right now that have come over parking lots and it s really working its way towards the u.s. 19 corridor. before too long we might see flooding along the flood zone a