like a freight train. we re seeing record-breaking and terrifying storm surges throughout florida and ft. myers, the water is so high pickup trucks are almost completely submerged. water levels have risen more than 6 feet in the last switch ho seven hours. let s get to tom sater in the cnn weather center. an updated forecast should come any minute now. what should we expect? it was just handed to me. forgive me for reading off. we still have a category 4 hurricane and five miles east of punta gorda. it will stay at hurricane strength through orlando. this will rake the entire peninsula. we had grove city a gust of 128. when we talk about the southern kind here, a better picture on radar will give an indication what we re looking at. here is the new track. keeps it as a 4 of course now moving inland but notice it s a category one. it will lose strength now that it s interacting with a land mass. that s typical. however, the winds have expanded now as these storms do. in fa
various places that we would do wellness checks on and everybody is in good shape for now. that s good news for now. mayor of orlando florida buddy dire. thank you. we re standing by for the news conference from ron desantis as hurricane ian slams into the state of florida with winds up to 140 miles an hour. we ll bring that to you live. the pictures from ian are unbelievable. the storm made landfall with winds so strong one of the create s wind meters broke. hold on, here is governor desantis. let s listen in. areas in southwest florida, lee, charlotte and counties beyond that, we have seen life threatening storm surge as was predicted and collier county, santa bell, ft. myers beech and inner flooding so some of the counties in the interior of the
like a freight train. we re seeing record-breaking and terrifying storm surges throughout florida and ft. myers, the water is so high pickup trucks are almost completely submerged. water levels have risen more than 6 feet in the last switch ho seven hours. let s get to tom sater in the cnn weather center. an updated forecast should come any minute now. what should we expect? it was just handed to me. forgive me for reading off. we still have a category 4 hurricane and five miles east of punta gorda. it will stay at hurricane strength through orlando. this will rake the entire peninsula. we had grove city a gust of 128. when we talk about the southern
get heavier rain in orlando as the storm makes its way into the state moving east. how worried are you what you saw in maples playing out in central florida? so refinished our preparation and in wait it out mode. we think we ll get the worst of it tomorrow and we anticipate at least tropical storm strength winds if not hurricane forced winds and it s on a path kind of like charlie in 2004 but we think we ll have it for a more extended period of time. charlie came to town for about an hour and looks like we ll have this storm for many hours. when charlie came through, we lost 10,000 trees so we re anticipating we ll have a lot of damage to our trees, a lot of
inches of rain over the course of 36 hours and we have never experienced that type of event so the water has to go somewhere. what is the situation with people in retirement homes or assisted living facilities that don t have the ability to evacuate? reca what precautions have been taken for them? we re really not a place you need to evacuate from. people from other areas of the state are evacuating to us. we re one of the higher points in the state. we re 90 to 100 feet above sea level. it s kind of funny in the case of charlie, as well, a lot of people evacuated to orlando thinking orlando would be spared and then it turned and kind of the same thing is happened here. we ve had people that evacuated from the west coast turns out they re still going to be in the path of the hurricane. so we have checked on all of this senior facilities, and