know he has a question for you. chad. mr. mayor, you are watching zone a, zone b, hillsborough. now that the storm should travel right over tampa bay, are there any changes in the evacuation zones from what we knew 24 hours ago? no, there s not, chad. it is still a zone a ezackuation. the issue in zone a will be the amount of the surge and the height of the surge. unfortunately, this will take place at a time when the high tide is at its highest, which will be tomorrow morning. so all those houses on davis island, downtown tampa, will be affected by the high tide as well. mayor, jake tapper here. i m sorry, anderson. we ve heard different things about the kind of threat tampa wassed under. the latest information obviously that tampa might not get a direct hit, but it might actually be worse because the storm surge will be that much
speakers, told them they were doing the wrong thing. i spoke to people out, there they wanted to satisfy their curiosity. all had a plan to retreat as the storm gets worse. i talked about this and janice talked about how much of the problems, the water is expected to come rolling back into tampa bay and the connected bodies of water and doesn t have anywhere to go but to push into the low-lying areas, push into the tributaries. that is why the local authorities have been concerned. that s why they ve been bang the drum about the mandatory evacuations here in tampa for zone a, across the bay in pinellas county, zones a and b and essentially amounts to 15 feet above sea level and everything below. now given the fact they have been banging the drum, telling people to get out. that was then, this is now. the storm is on its way. the window to make a break for it is now closed. if you re one of the people who made the decision you wanted to
joining us is mike tobin. how is it going? it s amazing how calm it has been in tampa throughout the night. we just started to get a little bit of restaurant last hour or so and every once in a while we ll get a few gusts of wind. but the streets are largely empty because most of people heeded the warnings and they have gone further upstate. but you still have people, you can probably see some of them out in the bars making a big night of it. and having a hoot. granted we are in a place that is not a mandatory evacuation area. further down is zone a and zone b. that s where you have a mandatory evacuation order. also mobile homes, mandatory
cuba and consistently making their way north. i mean this is extraordinary. chris hayes, stay with us. we want to bring in johnny boynkins from pinales park, florida. first what made you decide to stay? well weren t in an immediate evacuation zone. my house is not near a coastal area. and i wanted to give those folks in zone a and b a chance to get on the rooted and i didn t want to get bogged down in traffic trying to get out of pinales county and the state of florida. let s talk about what you ve done to protect your home. what precautions have you taken? well we ve taken steps to you kn secure all of the lawn furniture, moving things from the outside to the inside. making sure that the windows and doors are secured. you know helping our neighbors put sand bags where they need to
we are at a low lying barrier island and zone a, which was the first zone to be evacuated during mandatory evacuation. and we have experienced several hurricanes, we take it very seriously. our residents were actually very compliant. we also had our police and our fire out there, urging everyone to evacuate as soon as possible. that was good. so you wait with everybody else in your community there. what are conditions like right now in key biscayne? right now, i ll tell you, we have surveillance cameras and they re out, so there is no power. and throughout the day yesterday we were already experiencing flooding. we had over the causeway had been covered with water, during the high tide, and we had as far as reports, a couple of downed