with the debris still flying and i don t know if you saw that, but there was another blue kind of concussive blast just over my left shoulder. you might have been able to see that briefly so again, looks like more transformers are exploding here in balm beach. you know, you talked about the strange nature of the storm and not being able to predict where it s going, that s been the case here for more than eight hours because we ve been in intense hurricane force winds for eight hours as we ve been in kind what have they call the dirty side of the storm, with the regrouping of the energy pushing it in a circular way and pushing it straight into palm beach, the actual wind gusts here have turned circular in recent hours so that s been another kind of dangerous aspect here with debris flying and some of it is not, these are not light objects that are flying around. so anderson, they are certainly not out of danger here in palm beach and they might have expected to be by now but they are ce
so much so we know the orange county emergency services has suspended their services for the night into tomorrow. you can hear in my microphone the heavy wind gusts and i keep picking over to my right because when i talk to your left, i was talking about the globes that are around the lamp posts littering all of downtown orlando and one to my right is hanging by a thread. so i m keeping an eye on that. i want to mention to you, as you were talking to tom, he mentioned the east coast having tornadic activity. i did confirm with the brevard county sheriffs department they had two tornadoes touch down. that s according to them. they have a lot of thodamage wi mobile home there is. so far, no injuries reported so that s good news. but they did have two tornadoes. it just kind of gives you the idea of how big this storm is because remember i was there
could be 3 million people without power as the storm affects this region. asked a little bit more could it possibly be more than that and he said yes, it would be hard to speculate there could be as many as 5 million people without power. now imagine that. when we were talking about why you probably need to leave, category 5 hurricane, maybe category 4, is going to make land fall. category 3, not a lot of gas to talk about. maybe there would be damage to the place you re seeking some security, your home, perhaps you re near the coast, you have the storm surge to worry about. you could see the potential for 10, 12 inches of rainfall, maybe some isolated heavier amounts. maybe you re in the quadrant where there s tornadic activity. tornado watch out for ft. lauderdale, miami, into the florida keys, over through the
landfall? it goes up the spine of florida as a category three. so it s interaction with lands is going so its interaction with land is going to weaken it. a major hurricane, category three. even into georgia, tropical storm strength as we go into the beginning of the workweek. here we are at friday. this has been a category-five hurricane since early morning tuesday, and it s friday. this is a frightening storm. and as the mayor of miami said a day or so ago, this is a nuclear hurricane. it is so broad and so you know, just concise, a clearly defined eye has given little up. even as it has interacted with some of these islands, bahamas will be the next, and if you on are the upper right quadrant of the hurricane, that s where we look for tornadic activity. it could happen anywhere. that s really kind of the core.
there s 60 or 70 miles where it looks like it s all just water. looks like lake after lake after lake. that s how bad the flooding is. we re talking about, as rick said, some of the waters going down. remember, all the water in all of these watersheds, it eventually has to make its way back into the gulf of mexico. the reason that these areas are flooding and in danger of more imminent flooding is because you simply have to get that water somewhere and it s going to go through these various towns and neighborhoods along the way back to the gulf. just think about this for a minute. six days ago, you had a category four hurricane that hit texas. it was followed by the worst tropical storm in history, in the history of this country, and then you have all the sporadic tornadic activity and now the reservoirs that are full and they re also threatening a variety of neighborhoods. we ll continue our coverage following the aftermath of hurricane harvey.