A very high level. Some are saying its one of the biggest storms ever to hit our country. It built very rapidly,ed a briefing with secretary of Homeland Security and the administrator of fema and we are watching Hurricane Michael. Its just hitting shore now. Winds are going up to close to 200 miles an hour. Category 4. You dont hear about that. Its the most powerful recorded storm to strike the Florida Panhandle ever. It will bring with it anywhere from 150 mile to almost 200 mile an hour winds. The storm surges could be up to 15 feet. Additional rainfall could also produce Flash Flooding at the highest levels. We have been in constant communications with governor rick scott of florida. With all the authorities in the various states. Were very well prepared for massive amounts of food and we have First Responders all over, the Electrical Companies are staged and ready to go in after the storm. Over a thousands trucks. We have large amounts of food and water and Everything Else that you
meteorologist tom sater is in the cnn severe weather center. that s where we want to start, tom. sustained winds, 185 miles per hour. this is a monster. gusts over 200 making matters worse. yes. this hurricane is movie ininy slowly. you could outwalk it really. in fact, tg going to slow down to maybe 2 1/2 miles per hour. the sun is setting now. i fear when the sun rises parts of the abaco islands in the bahamas will look like puerto rico. it will look like the u.s. and british virgin islands after irma and maria moved through those regions. some of those islands, they had to take everybody off. it was uninhabited. this has been a buzzsaw through the entire area. we ve had a couple of landfalls now. well-defined eye. when the eye passed over its first initial landfall area, the winds died down, ana. they were able to get some heavy machinery in there to try to grab as many people that were meandering the streets in shock to get them out of the way before the back edge of the eye
the downtown area will be devastated. we re expected high tide tonight. back to you. bill, when gabe says on the dirty side of the storm. tell us about that. the dirty side, people will refer to that on the eastern side of the storm. you get the southerly winds for a longer period of time which tend to be the stronger winds. a lot of times it s the rainier side. they will drag the cooler, drier air on the back side. usually they will call that the dirty side. got it. what happens now? we haven t had and probably because we haven t had an update from the hurricane center yet. i would expect the next report says the winds are lower. we ll start quickly lowering. we ve been focusing so much on the landfall area and the damage that s being done, let s quickly, we got a lot of people that will be in the way of the