over land. the eye won t reach wilmington for hours yet. correspondent miguel almaguer has been on the coastline, taking all of the wind and rain as the storm nears wilmington. miguel, again, it looks like from radar you are coming out the back end of an intense band of rain, but it doesn t look any lighter where you are. yeah, brian. it has actually gotten worse over the last couple of hours. i want to start though with the good news. there haven t been any reports of serious damage to structures, but the bad news, brian, as you know, it is still early in this storm and as you mentioned we are just getting the first serious wave of rain. the last check, a county official said that hurricane-force winds are now hitting the city of wilmington and we can certainly feel that out here. the rain has been blowing side ways over the last several hours. as a matter of fact, the winds have been picking up here. some buildings here have lost
that s why we always care about that and we still have a tornado watch going throughout the night. we are still holding to the numbers. we will wait and see what the morning high tide looks like. we probably will get the landfall somewhere 8:00 a.m., 11:00 a.m., somewhere in that window. as it is making landfall, the backside winds will be pumping the water towards the beach from wrightsville beach up to cape lookout, the emerald isle area, winslow county. we will just deal from there, brian, with the horrendous rainfall for this area, which the rain story will go through saturday, maybe saturday night and even into sunday in the mountains of western north carolina. when the mountains of north carolina get five to ten inches of rain, that s another issue with flash flooding. we are already seeing roof-top rescues because we were told on the air earlier tonight yes. at this stage in the storm they have to be by boat. you cannot launch rotor aircraft in this, v-22 ospreys, any of
safe and their belongings are safe. sorry, mayor. have you talked to any of your friends, your fellow mayors of any of the small towns around to see how they re faring out on the river? yeah, i talked to chuck allen over in goldsboro and they re doing pretty good. he was very concerned about what is going on in new bern. you know, we have a metro mayors group and we really work very close together and we provide each other resources as needed. so, you know, it is just the outpouring has been tremendous and the cooperation among agencies here in the county has been something to be proud of. unfortunately but unfortunately up to this point you re the mayor of the town that appears to be hit the hardest, is that correct? it is. it is. you know, i m not you know, this is terrible, but we re able to get through it and we ll be better for it. we believe you. we believe you, mayor.