thanks so much for being with us. i know it is early. but any sort of damage assessment at this point? it has really been horrific here. if you listen to the meteorologists, they were talking about where the storm is going to hear, many of them often said, whoever is just south, into that dirty part of the storm, is going to get significant storm surge. and we got a try and shove it in naples and marco island and port of the islands, i hoses supery, basically the top of my district have a big chunk of naples and all those pieces of paradise that everyone loves to live and down here, but then the trade-off is, unique storms like this. this one was less about wind and more about this storm surge for us. in 2017 we had irma that came through here and a lot of damage, a lot of wind damage, and there was a strong cat four. and we also had some storm surge. but the storm surge at the last minute was because the storms change
for that, after katrina, and the gulf coast, they largely fix or wind damage, where they could. here s the question. to the extent that water is a problem, and increasingly a more serious problem, what is the correlation between that and the fact that we have rising water levels in the first place so that in places like miami you see water coming through the drain sometimes in good weather in places like charleston floods with very little rain what is the correlation when it comes to climate between already rising water levels and intensification of these storms, the sweater, rainy, more powerful storms? absolutely, ali. i m glad you brought that. up that s one of the most basic functions of climate change, foundation of water is rising. about a foot in the last hundred years. you can legitimately say the top compared to say 100 years ago. they have a.
storm. you can t have that in our country. we just can t have a. it strikes me to hear you reference hurricane andrew and think about the fact that that was more than 30 years ago, which means you have been doing this important work for more than 30 years. i hope i but yes, i ve been doing this along time. it is important because it gives you a sense of context and the lessons we have learned and the lessons we have, not unfortunately. one more quick thing. this storm, in a way, it is kind of bad news for the people that are trying to deny climate change, in fact. you have another example of the increasing severity and ferocity of the storms that we are getting. this is not going to stop. there is no more excuse for trying to ignore the fact that the warming of our planet and the seas is causing more water to be absorbed into the evaporated the atmosphere and
Christine Bomlitz, of Las Vegas, had been anxious to reach her mother, Shirley Affolter, an 84-year-old resident of a retirement community just north of where Hurricane Ian made landfall. She
i m sorry, this past summer, it is brutal. and we see rising temperatures which heats we ve for to see some very violent storms coming through, even afternoon rains are no longer just the afternoon rain said i grew up with. they are serious storms that come off the waters. so we have to prepare as a state. we have to fortify ourselves and be ready for the eventuality of this happening every year on one of the co-signs. and especially in the tampa bay area, we are kind of a horseshoe shape. so if the water rushes in or pushes in to tampa bay has nowhere to go but down to the land and into the homes and we just see tides that are changing the flow of water. and we have a lot of work to do and it s nothing that we have