charleston a half hour ago. charleston is still flooding but will flood a little less. we do have reports from charleston in the city. i m around the edge of it obviously by the harbor, but in the city, we do have a good deal of flooding. we have a number of wires down. we have live wires in the water. that always becomes a concern for those in the hurricane, walk around, drive around, you get stuck in very little water. there s more than a little water in charleston and we do have live wires down. we re starting to see power outages, things like that. winds are not calm enough for most rescues to be under way right now. this is charleston, an urban area. this is a central part of a much broader suburb and rural area half a million people live. we just got a break, stephanie. there s no wind at all right now and very little rain. then it will come through in a gust probably within the minute. but this is an area that is saturated and with all this water, it s not as bad as we expected
around and available. at what point i would assume at this point i still see vehicles around. are there responses under way right now or waiting for this to pass? so, really we re waiting for this to pass. we haven t received any calls for requests for rescue in mount pleasant and we re very thankful for that. of course we do have our high water rescue vehicles staged throughout our municipality ready to respond to any of the needs of our citizens. so far we haven t had any requests for it. and we hope that continues to be the case. we were just speaking to the mayor of charleston, who was happy that this high tide is not going to be might be two feet lower than what the highest estimate was going to be, just looking out here into the harbor. it s choppy. the high tide is in and we ve got that wind pushing in onshore. but it looks like it s not going
there s still not a lot of place for it to go and this storm continues and gets closer to land as it pushes further north from where we are. i want to just check with our control room, steph, am i going back to you? yeah. i got another question for you, though. you said there s no wind right now but the gusts blow every few minutes. it s too dangerous for rescues. is the wind so strong that it could actually do structural damage? well, i do have reports actually from charleston that there is some structural damage here. most of it is trees and fences, but we do have some reports of a building where there s been some structural damage. at moments it kind of depends on the sustained winds. what we saw in the bahamas is that their houses are built for category 4 storms that can get a category 5 for a short time but they had it for 48 hours or 51 hours or something and buildings give in. so depends on the amount of stress on a given building here. we do have some initial reports
see, the winds have really picked up. i want to say what stands out the most being here is the emptiness of this place. there is one beach chair sitting there as the wind picks up but by and large the beach is empty and so is the neighborhood. this is the northern part of the outer banks as you know and normally this would be entirely packed with vacationers. yes we re on the back side of the labor day holiday but still the outer banks an incredibly popular place in the off-season. we are here on the northern part of the outer banks. if you think of it kind of like the barrier islands crouching down going to the south highway 12 is the spinal cord that connects all of the islands. i spent the morning driving down the length of that two lane highway. it was eerily empty as well. i was heading south. most people were heading north, ali. you look, most of the shops are boarded up. most of the houses are boarded up as well. people taking this really seriously until you get to the very sout
there is a notification on my phone. 4:00 in the morning. i open the windows in my hotel, look out over the ocean because i read a report that it was out on the water, a water spout. i can t see anything out there. and that is what is so hard about these tornado warnings when they come in the middle of the night. it is terrifying and super stressful for the residents here. yeah, for a hundred percent of the time i know right now until we re on the other side of this, i know the wind is coming in this way so my body is braced against wind coming in this way. i ll either stand upright if no wind or brace into it this way. the wind is not coming from that side. the danger with tornadoes in hurricanes is a tornado can show up on any side of you and it can shred everything in sight. much more powerful than a category 2 hurricane, which is what we re experiencing right now. we re getting tropical force winds off of that. let s go to david gura in nags head where your situation is a little