late afternoon, early evening. so we re hunkering down. back to you. we ll keep our eyes on your position and mississippi as well. bill, let s talk about where ron allen is and what s coming for jackson. it looks like the storm is spinning to the east right over mississippi? yeah. i m not as concerned with the power outages up in jackson, i think we ll get gusts up to 40 miles per hour in that area. the storm is going to weaken that the wind damage isn t substantial. flash flooding could be a possibility if you live near streams that could be an issue too. winds are in the 20 mile per hour range right now. one of the stories that i think is going to develop today and everything i m reading about the power outages in new orleans, this is not a flip of the switch type of thing. it s a lot of people ahead of the storm that had the means and money left now the people waking
this doesn t change the fact that there has been a declaration that has allowed the national guard to get out there, but, chris, so you re in a temporary respite at the moment. you will get the other side of this very shortly. anything obvious to you, around you, in terms of damage that you re seeing? you know, the palm trees are sort of a miracle of engineering and they evolved for precisely that reason and even that, there are a bunch of palm trees down and palm fronts down. it is going to hold which is that the winds were very intense and they were 110 miles an hour, but a lot of things that were built here have been built fairly recently. the ratings that were required after hurricane andrew here for a category 2 were above winds and the construction were rated even higher. on the whole, the wind damage isn t going to be the worst part of this and the worst part of of this is that there are hundreds of millions of dollars of property lining an ocean that s
the whole storm will play up right along the coast here and then we get up towards tampa here at the top of the screen. let s talk about the speed of this storm and the intensity of the storm. it picked up from what it was doing over the water. i ve been impressed. this was a cat 3 and usually with a cat 3. you can expect gusts of 120. that 142-mile-per-hour wind gusts at the naples airport. that was wow, that would do significant damage to not only trees, but structure snoors the people who say they have these hurricane-proof windows, it s meant to withstand something hitting it at 140 or 150 miles an hour. we re at the top of that. does the fact that it made landfall at marco island, does that mean it will weaken and slow down? it may help lower the winds a little bit. these are some of the tide gauges and we ll be updating these. this is st. petersburg toward the clearwater beach area.
shots is we ve finally gotten our first look at the damage from marco island and the police department there was able to get up to the roof of the building and this is what happened when the eye passed over giving you a look as you said, the vegetation being ripped from the earth. people in marco island are being told to, quote, evacuate vertically. so get upstairs because that storm is just coming. let me give you one more look. that is the storefront in miami and this is what s happening and this is what s headed. it looks like in a fish tank, and the warnings that our colleagues at the weather channel have been superb at pointing out. when we talk about storm surge it s not pretty, pristine water. it contains everything you can imagine your block or your neighborhood containing. it contains every obstruction, every projectile and it s dangerous. that is just one place and one perspective and they re trying
feeling of some type of eye and maybe it s the changing nature of irma. one of the questions that we talked about earlier, brian was about the damage and now that we have that sideways rain stopped and i ll point over here and you can see the roofs, but if you see the brown spots on the roofs there, that s where the shingles have ripped off the tar paper underneath has ripped off and that is where, of course, for these homeowners, the greatest problem will be with roof leaks, but as i scan the horizon here, i don t see any roofs that have actually been ripped off, but i can see here to the left the trees that have literally snapped and that are down and then, of course, we ve got the palm fronts and the palm trees that are down as well. so we re giving you an early assessment of the damage that we can see in just one little area and if mike bettes was on 41 he s literally blocked from us. so he was i don t know how far south or north he is, but we re