the water temperatures were four to 6 degrees warmer than they should be this time of year. the fuel was rapidly developing. there was a cold front in the west providing tornadoes from texas up to iowa. so that front is now stretched from wisconsin to louisiana. it s just off the west. that is pushing the system quicker. winds at 85, just dropped another 5 miles per hour in the last update. gusted around 100, chris. it says 1515 here. it s updated every six hours. you and sam wrapped it up nicely. even though the infrared imagery is breaking down, there is rainfall in the northern half of the storm. even though we may see gusts at 1100, they re not going to have them like at tyndall air force base. wind gauge broke at 130. it could be higher. there were isolated tornadoes. we had one in downtown atlanta, southwest of macon, seven homes destroyed.
water-driven storm surge but rather the wind damage and the wind damage just a short distance from here, about a 15-minute drive, one of the marinas, a good portion of it collapsed. i ve got to tell you i was out in the winds today at 150 some odd miles an hour. i didn t have a wind gauge. but i ll tell you, it took me off-balance. i was wearing a protective helmet, blew it right off my head. so what the folks who are doing now is determining how bad the damage is before they allow people back onto this barrier island, the three bridges remain closed because you can see the wind is still blowing. the real concern, of course, also not letting people back on tomorrow because everybody always wants to come home is those downed power lines. there are downed power lines here, the power is mostly out on this beach area, but that doesn t mean that there might be a live wire still down. so anybody planning on returning, if they fled as they were asked to do, that mandatory evacuation, they mig
clear the roadways. the curfew is because we don t want people to be out during this period of time where we re trying to get everything cleaned up and straightened up where it s safe to be out. you say you re seeing some wind and some rain there. talk to me a little more about the conditions you re under right now, mayor. we have this pretty heavy gust right now. my wind gauge says 60 miles per hour on the gust right now. it s raining pretty solid right now. i heard your reporter talking about seeing the flashes in new bern from the transformers. and we re seeing the same thing here. a lot of people have lost power here. it s probably going to get progressively worse through the
with 140 miles per hour. so when you look at it that way. everything is good right now. we have seen through here is some of the fiberglass which i expect is from some of the roofing in the area. we re in a business park. we re behind a grocery store behind a sporting good store. and hiding in the best spot we can. i m standing out in the area where there s kind of a tunnel you can feel the wind coming through. in this area as it has been in wilmington all night. the wind has been swirling. you can t anticipate where it s coming from. as we stand in and out it will slow for a moment and pick back up. that s what we ll have in the bands as this storm continues to try to make land fall. slowly. you don t have a wind gauge do you? i don t. that one got passed onto someone
earlier. wind gauge stopped working by the way. we had some reports near the coastal areas around 100. that s to be expected. the actual storm path, this is the new one that s just out from the hurricane center, they have it at 8:00 a.m. just off the coast. so they re still thinking somewhere late tomorrow morning as we go throughout the early morning hours after sunrise. we could get that landfall. it s really going to be just for the history books. we re not going to see a huge amount of wind damage right where the eye is because it s not that kind of storm. the hurricane force winds extend 80 miles from the center even with a category 1 which is very unusual. so it s a large storm. think of a storm almost like a hurricane sandy was. that was only a 1, but it did considerable storm surge damage, much more than you d expect with a category 1. then from this point on we re going to drift the storm through south carolina, really haven t seen any changes with the storm surge. just becaus