lying, almost near sea level. in cape coral where i was, it was a community that was built to have accessibility to the water for many if not all of the homes. 179,000 people in that very low lying region. the hope is that the water does not flood that home. we have to wait and see. but the storm is approaching fast and is approaching furious. at this hour, all we can hope for is that people are safe and they are ready for hurricane irma to hit. alex? thank you so much for that. let s head south to the area being most greatly impacted. i m being joined on the phone by the may yr of monroe county. that includes the florida keys. mr. mayor, with a welcome to you, sir, on this very precarious night for you in your community. first of all, may i ask you where insure. i am in marathon, staying at a private residence, a very
wracking both on camera and off camera. so we re just trying to be very careful about where we are. right now we re on the western side of a building that s shuttered up here, so that helps us out. what we re looking at all of that being blown generally away from us. so as things get so much stronger here, this is critical that we find a place. we shelter ourselves against a wall so that we don t have to worry about that. when we were talking to you further south before, we were very careful that the area on the other side of the street was just an open area that was vegetation, that there weren t there was not anything that could be a projectile as far as we could tell. but you re right. that s exactly what we have to watch out for especially now. julia bagg, be very careful there in florida state. thank you for your live report to you and your camera crew. back here in studio. irma is where right now relative to what we saw with julia there?
do not want to leave the area or could not and had to take shelter there. that is all identify heard from key west. we have been in our control booth trying to reach out to places we know were supposed to be still populated and we have not been able to get through. other officials i know they ve been going to voice mail. that is all i can tell you at this point. that again is through a colleague of mine who has been reaching out on facebook to people that he knows down in that area. so, what are your concerns about key west? well, key west is south and west of marathon and i thought that they might be experiencing something a little ahead of what we will be experiencing. we have a similar situation in marathon where the high school was set up as a shelter of last resort. and i toured there late this afternoon. at that point in time there were a lot of people coming in who
you ve predicted for this storm. we saw phillip mena in the ft. lauderdale area. he s dealing with tornadoes coming his way. you saw the winds. we could see the rain. it was loud. two different worlds. it s these tropical rain bands. we call them feeder bands. they move very quickly. i m going to zoom you in on the radar and show you where those bands are right now and where phillip s live shot was. he s in the ft. lauderdale area. there s the tornado warning in effect. these aren t like your typical texas tornadoes sounds like a freight train for a while and you have a visible tornado for you. so, this is why you need to be in your safe place and just stay there here throughout the duration of the storm. but when these warnings are issued, you want to be away from glass. you want to be in the lowest
floor of your home. and away from windows here because even though there are weaker tornadoes, still 90, 100 mile-per-hour winds can blow out your windows. kristen was on the western side of florida into the ft. myers area. look, not a whole lot happening. but this band is working its way towards the west. so these bands are coming in from east moving to the west. so if you get these tornado spinups, they re from southeast to northwest. this is very concerning. this is the eye wall. it s not far now from the wee west area. let s put the distance tool on here and we ll track that outer eye wall. we ve been watching it get closer and closer now. it s about 35 miles, that s where the real, real destructive winds, we re talking about 130, possibly gusts of 140 miles per hour. it s approaching areas like south of marathon, grassy key, anywhere south of iomorata.