that storm surge. yes, rain is also coming. some of these areas, savannah, maybe a foot of precipitation. so water is going to be everywhere. nick, even though it s weakening, there s still some folks that need to be paying attention. absolutely. no doubt that whole map right there just covered in red . that s something you don t see every day. all right. well, thank you, adam. let s get it over to now. fox, where there s max gordon, who is in st. petersburg, florida. where intense wind and rain pummeled the area through the day and night. and max, the mayor there has asked residents to shelter in place. and that s got a population of about a quarter of a million. so a lot of people kind of hunkering down here tonight. take it away, sir. the weather is gradually improving here in the tampa st. petersburg area. it is still pretty gusty. a lot of people here expected this hurricane to make a direct hit here. and a lot of people are breathing a sigh of relief,
though there has been scenes of devastation down south, we re now learning more about the assets that are going to be deployed down to southwestern florida. according to the governor s office, around five thousand florida national guardsmen are going to be responding, as well as two thousand national guardsmen from other parts of the country. they ll be using high wheeled vehicles, boats and helicopter to get in and rescue people. there s also going to be five usar teams, urban search and rescue teams from florida and several federal teams as well. they ll be able to get into those hard to reach areas because they have the expertise really to make was technical search and rescue operations. now here locally, in the tampa st. petersburg area, the ports are still closed. many bridges are still closed, including the sunshine skyway. the school closures are still in effect in 50 nine different school districts across florida. this has truly been a statewide disaster here.
0 our growing family. i need a home office and i needed us to not have a roommate anymore. and real time alerts made sure i never missed out on the listing. it makes home buying so much easier. start saturday, strong saturday on fox .com. we called michigan s dominant ground game in a tough protest against dial. a lot of big names saturday on fox. this is fox, whether on fox news and we re tracking hurricane in a powerful and dangerous storm making landfall as a cat for her game this afternoon in southwest florida, just west of fort myers. yeah, incredible video out of the bay. and i m sure it s only going to continue to, well, stream in this in all the video. let s just say that an overall slow moving, bringing those catastrophic winds, as you see, playing the video, as well as that life threatening storm surge, widespread flooding, power knocked out to more than two million across florida. the devastating winds, all of this is heading north northeast. so we ll talk about the flood
thank you. great to be with you. secrecy jess fox weather correspondent g max gore den is live. where we are right now truly the window sounds like a fraft train-freight train. we were expecting the eye of the storm really to hit the tampa-st. petersburg area. it went to the south. we are still experiencing some pretty extreme conditions here and we saw a pretty unique phenomenon earlier in the day. in tampa bay, we saw the water actually empty out when we were expecting a storm surge earlier. we verse storm surge that we saw was really from these northerly winds pushing the water out of the bay ahead of this storm. now, of course these waters are now starting to return but sort of an erie sight earlier in the day. you could walk out to some of the mud flaps that wasn t
rainfall. that trough is sending winds from the north at the surface. irma s winds at the surface are moving northward. where they both converge from around the tampa st. pete area to lakeland toward orlando, that conversion causes the air to rise to squeeze out much, much more in the way of rainfall. take the landfall of ian out of the equation and we ve got ourselves one to two feet of rain. rainfall rates at two to three inches an hour after hour after hour. no community can with stand that. considering how far away so many communities are at the north, we ll have 911 calls, numerous of them. you can start to see radar estimates right now over ten inches right now north of ft. myers. the worst surge is down to the south where you get to around naples. the surge we believe got as high as seven feet in naples until the monitoring equipment went dead. it s much higher than that.