stays there. in 2004, the sunshine state is walloped by three back-to-back storms. she s devastating, you know, it s just you know, you never expect this at all. reporter: the first is hurricane charlie in august 2004. it makes a last-minute curve to the right, sparing tampa, and smacking port charlotte and punta gorda leveling both communities. before it s over, the category 4 storm kills 15 and causes $15 billion in damage. before residents even have time to catch their breath, a few weeks later, hurricane francis slams into florida s east coast as a category 2 storm. six people in the u.s. are killed. then only three weeks later, hurricane gene. worse than the first time, a double whammy. reporter: gene makes landfall near stuart, florida, at virtually the same spot that francis had come ashore.
so he even has the energy to take the long way home. keep it up, steve! dr. scholl s. born to move. we are getting a perspective on how powerful hurricane irma is. major you flew in to the hurricane last night and you have planes up now, what is going on with the storm, is it maintaining its strength? it is, actually, and it s kind of unprecedented that it is maintaining the strength at such a strong storm. irma has been a category 5 for three days now, and it s the strongest category, or strongest storm to come out of the atlantic on record to come out of the atlantic ocean. it s amazing that it has maintained strength this long. what about the organization,
low populations and have been evacuated. the danger has not passed. irma is racing toward the bah a baham bahamas, as we speak, do you feel your country is prepared for the storm? yes, we are prepared as best as we can under the circumstances for category 5 storm approaching. we are monitoring the storm for the three or four days. based that we evacuated some people from islands. you said this is the largest evacuation in your history. do you know how many are in shelters? probably as much as 170 persons in shelters. all the others were able to link up with family members or loved ones in the province. so that s a good sign. i understand the
drinking, they were having a good time. what s your advice to them? first of all, there are psychologists that could probably help you from making comments like that because it s just crazy. this is a storm that we ve never dealt with. it s one of the worst storms that has ever hit the atlantic and they need to get out of there. yes, it may be less than what we ve been looking at at these 185-mile-an-hour winds that have been going on for a while. it may bouncing off of cuba be reduced in intensity, but 175 miles an hour and down to 145 is still a major storm. a killer storm. i ve got a history of storms going back to 1957 in louisiana where i grew up on the gulf coast and this storm concerns me
wall area, and that s what you start to get josteled around, you are obscure with cloud cover and rain, what is unique about the major hurricanes is, as soon as you hit the eye wall, and punch through it and it opens up in to the clear blue sky and calm winds. so, it s incredible. you talked about you could feel the power of the storm as you were flying through it. how do you feel that in an aircraft? well, one example is there s something that we call slip. and so, when you are flying through the storm, you know, you are trying fly in at a straight line, and but, you know, you are getting blown from the side so much, so, we have a slip. so we were at about 35 degrees slip. that means to maintain a constant heading, we had to be 35 degrees pointed the other direction. it s an example of how extremely strong the storm is. major, i appreciate all the