i m john berman in ft. myers, florida, and the storm has intensified again. 85-mile-per-hour winds, heading towards the carolinas. this after tearing the destructive path across florida. it is expected to make landfall in south carolina around midday, somewhere between charleston and myrtle beach. it could produce life-threatening floods there in the carolinas. this is already liskely the largest natural disaster in florida s history. i m standing in the middle of some of the damage, in a marina where the boats have been washed up on to the shore here. parts of florida have been seriously damaged. as of this morning, 19 storm-related deaths. that number will almost certainly rise. in ft. myers beach, some of the destruction is breathtaking. i had a chance to have an aerial view of it, take a helicopter ride over, and there were sections that were just washed away. the pier, the large pier there, you can see it almost better from air. that s just been completely washed away. a
i was on the police department for 25 years, saw a lot of storms here. this is by far the worst storm i have ever witnessed. i promise you, i m never going to sit through another storm ever again here. i am one of the lucky ones. just some of the survivors of hurricane ian after the storm decimated wide sections of florida, and now the storm is on track to make a second u.s. landfall threatening the carolinas and georgia. good morning, and welcome to morning joe, it is friday, september 30th. joe is off this morning, but we ll get right to the latest with ian. intensing into a hurricane again, heading to south carolina after leaving a trail of devastation in florida. it is expected to make landfall near charleston around noon today as a category 1 storm. the national hurricane center is warning it could unleash life threatening storm surge, floods and strong winds. a state of emergency is in place for the carolinas, georgia and virginia. the damage from hurricane ian is
well, in areas that you physically can t get to and can t get to quickly that could be flooded, we put drone teams up where we use artificial intelligence and camera technology on the drone and it tells us where stations might be flooded and it tells us what supplies we re going to need to be ready when we can get into the area and restore power. one of the silver linings in the first 48 hour was the fact that our transmission grid held up in the west counties. we did not have a single transmission structure damaged, which is a huge benefit to us to be able to determine once we get into the other areas and get down to the grid level, we will be able to restore that power. if the transmission structures had been destroyed, it would have delayed us even longer. i ll never forget after
good morning, mika. since the start to have the storm, we have more than 2 million fpl customers in power outages. we have been able to restore over a million of those already. that does mean, however, that we still have one million customers without power. that s predominantly on the west coast of the state, that s where we ve seen the biggest effect from the storm. are there areas that the infrastructure itself has been destroyed and what s the time line on that? absolutely. so the good news is that if you look at the west coast, while we still have a million customers out, we were there yesterday assessing the damage. we re continuing to do that. that s going to continue over the next couple of days. one of the silver linings is that our transmission structures held up very well in this storm. we have put significant investment into our grid to harden it over the last ten years. and those investments paid off because the transmission
certain areas. we re challenged by some flood waters still in place, challenged by traffic and other things. we have resources in our territory to respond and restore power, but we have a set of expectations. this is still manually a labor-intensive process. we re encouraged by some of what we re seeing. the investments we ve put in over the last decade, about $3 billion worth is actually yielding results in what we think of faster restoration. by that i mean we re not seeing the poles down we anticipated, the transmission structures on the ground. that s the backbone of our system, almost the interstate highway of electricity that helps us bring power into the neighborhoods and the like. so we think we re going to be in a better position than we were going into it, but it s still going to be a frustrating