brought down big trees as you see and across the country, air traffic is snarled on this day before the martin luther king junior holiday. nearly 3,000 flights have been cancelled. following the path of the enormous storm and damage, diane gallagher starts us off in charlotte north carolina and in pittsburgh. di diane, let me begin with you. they re not used to snow let alone a foot. this is icy, dangerous, sticky snow. reporter: that s exactly the problem here poppy. you re seeing these beautiful flakes falling now. this is not what we experienced most of the day in charlotte. it was freezing rain and sleet. if you look at the live drone we re flying, you can see the interstates are cleared off but look wet and that s the biggest concern that there is going to be a freeze again overnight. people are going to feel they re comfortable to drive and they re going to be dealing with tr
little bit for time before they can clear off all the roads. we re seeing some of the roads in the charlotte area get cleared off quickly but that s not the case across the state and poppy, the biggest issue with the ice as well is the heaviness and what that might mean for trees and power lines, at one point there were more than 90,000 power outages across the strate. just because they re not seeing the same weather doesn t mean power outages may not increase overnight. diane, thank you very much to you and your team reporting on it for us, let s follow the path of the storm and head north. palo what is expected to be done to prepare? reporter: the local national weather service expecting up to a foot of snow to fall in and around pittsburgh. here, the snowfall we re seeing is certainly going to test the city s ability to respond to keep the reads clear. i ll tell you why, we heard from the mayor on friday say the response that they had during the last major snow event
want to say you re safe from storm surge or things like that, we moved up here for safety and we still have to worry about rainfall and any flooding or anything like that, we re talking 6 to 10 inches of rainfall that they predicted here. it feels like we re not even in the heart of it yet. right, you still have a ways to go, you are going to get 6 to 10 inches of rain, the biggest deal with this storm surge, john, they re expected to get 8 to 13 feet of storm surge in panama city, all the way through the big bend of florida, so, john, this is a serious storm, it s still about 20 to 30 miles from shore, so it should be making landfall within the next couple of hours. 20 to 30 miles from shore. diane, stay safe even as you keep us informed. safety, make sure that s priority one. when we come back, the president just received an update from his team of teams preparing an
any of these barrier islands? not much, when you have a storm this big, the barrier islands aren t going to slow it down really or weaken the storm. what it s going to take is getting on to that main land mass, we get it on to the mainland, that s going to finally slow this storm down. that storm has amazing strength, incredible amounts of wind speed and when it starts to push inland, that s when it starts to grab gradually lose its strength. so we re going to have people in south georgia being caught off guard. because a lot of trees that are in your shot that we re seeing right now, that s going to be one of the biggest hazards with this storm is going to be the winds, it s going to take down those trees, those branches are going to snap and so that s going to be incredibly dangerous. you, diane, are still going to be in it for the next couple of hours, when that eye goes over you, you can actually see clear
apalachicola is getting about six feet of storm surge, and they re expecting to get 18 feet of storm surge. that s for st. joe, for mexico beach. i ll highlight it for you, it s very hard to see on this radar scope. that s the coast of florida so all of these areas along the coast are expected to get that 8 to 13 feet of storm surge. i understand that we have diane back. diane, can you hear me? uh-huh. are you, has it gotten worse for you? the winds are picking up for you, at this time, i m sure, the storm is about 30 miles from the coast where you are. yeah, and jen, we re starting to experience, the it s the longest sustained period that we have had all day long. like i said before, we were getting the bands of intense winds and we re just not getting the breaks anymore. i m going to go ahead and