zone, particularly in the southwest florida counties, your time to evacuate is coming to an end. you need to evacuate now. a life threatening category 4 storm headed right towards florida. i m john berman live in tampa this morning. brianna keilar is in washington and that is the news from overnight. hurricane ian strength jentd to a category 4 storm with sustained winds of 140 miles per hour. wind gusts of 165 miles per hour. the storm forecast has adjusted somewhat south of where i am in tampa headed right towards the fort myers area in florida about 100 miles south of here, but the threat to florida is enormous. more than 2 1/2 million people under some sort of evacuation order. yes, the wind speed is a serious threat now, a category 4 storm. storm surge where i am in tampa, they could see storm surge of 6 feet which would put the water pretty much right where i m stand going it hit the maximum levels down towards where the storm is expected to make landfall. they could
water. that s how much surge is going to come into this. randi kaye touched on this in punta gorda. we didn t get a surge. no, we were down there. this is a wind storm. this is a wind storm and a surge storm and a flood storm all in one. this is going to spread itself out across the entire state. everybody is going to see something and there is one on the eastern said of the state but the big problem i see, a 12-foot surge. all of those canal homes in cape coral, in punta gorda, there are thousands, they re only three feet above sea level. if this water comes up 12, that means water is up to the gutter. there s no place for you left in the house. you absolutely need to be out of those zone as and in many spots the zone bs as well. that kind of got put into effect
can handle what you have seen. are there particular infrastructure concerns in the city, bridges, dikes, dams you are worried about? not so much of that as we have a number of neighborhoods that are really low right at just barely above sea level. even when we get medium to heavy rains there tends to be significant flooding in those neighborhoods. when you take those neighborhoods that are already and historically been at risk and you have the kind of rain we are getting and add high tide and add two to four foot storm surge the impact it will have on these homes is going to be significant. in some ways that is our biggest concern. that is partly why the county that we are in issued an evacuation order as early as they did because we wanted to get people that were in zone as and zone bs out as quickly as we