our kids kept saying get out of there on monday or tuesday. i m like no, it s going to go to the east. i m not super worried. but now, yeah, we re worried. i ve be i ve been a paramedic for a long time and i ve seen this from the other side. joining live here at 1:30 eastern time. the mayor from jupiter, florida, which is under one of those mandatory evacuation orders. mayor, thanks for staying us late with us. sure, my pleasure. what can you tell us tonight? in palm beach county, we have had mandatory evacuations along the coastal boundaries. but we ve been watching the storm move to the west. and so we re feeling like we re not going to get the prunt of
Sole lifeline. the three other stations are closing for the storm. virgil fernandez is fire chief. what we want to do is make sure that our equipment is able to rerespond afterwards. we will keep a contingency here at one of the fire stations. but we don t want to mess up our equipment and not be able to respond. reerpt today, firefighter . reporter: the city has also announced first responders will not be responding at some point. after 40 miles an hour, we can t safely send personnel out in the street. reporter: residents planning to stay have been warned. when you hear the warnings, do you stop and pause? i think about it. everybody panics, but i try to remain calm. i take it as any other hurricane. we are preparing as best we can. reporter: the approaching storm, a twist of fate for chief
Evacuation orders. while we have seen quite a few people make their way to shelters, get out to low lying areas. miami-dade is undertaking the larger evacuation in their history, there are people who are choosing to stay point. we re grist we re grizzled veterans down here. but unfortunately there s a lot of people who get clinical. we do a lot of prep and thankfully most time, particularly in modern times, we have not had to ride out and deal with a very significant storm. you showed a graphic earlier, ari, of andrew, which was one of the most devastating storms in our history in the united states and essentially irma would swallow andrew in terms of its size. my district really appears to be headed for a direct hit, even with the western jog, because i remember the saw grass to the sea grass, from the everglades to the ocean. and the distance between naples
The rm so, either evacuating or weathering the storm is closing rapidly. possessions can be replaced. your life and your family cannot. let s not put too fine a point on it. if you have not evacuationed in an evacuation zone, you could do. i have my confidence in god. i know we ve prepared for the storm. and when a storm is coming the best thing you can do is prepare for it. you don t just sit there. do you think you might have to hunker down at home for a couple of days? hopefully. if it s still standing. i m very concerned. and i prepared like it s going to be a category four. five days of food, two weeks of water. my generator is filled .uh. people never lived in the dark like this. it s going to happen like hurricane andrew did. and so we re not getting back here, possible looting. or your national guard being here to protect the area. it s going to be unprecedented.
The storm per se, but we re still planning for storm surges and maybe more likely to have tropical storm winds rather than the bare brunt of the storm as it moves to the west. but we were certainly preparing for the worst, not more than 24 hours ago. sure. in our coverage tonight and our reporters on the ground have seen a lot of folks who are figuring out what they re doing. some getting gas, some going north. some getting gas and going home. what are you telling folks now at this stage? well, you know, the foebs that were in the mandatory evacuation area hopefully you made arrangements, you made a plan. if not, that simply means if something goes south in the middle of the storm there s no first reresponders that are going to be available to you until after the heavy winds have died down. so helpfully everybody has been accounted for.