The news. Thank you so, much good evening everyone, im laura coates and this is cnn tonight. Our Breaking News, a brandnew forecast for Hurricane Idalia, the storm rapidly intensifying as its lashing florida ahead of what is feared to be a catastrophic landfall on the states west coast in just a matter of hours. Potentially deadly storm surge and Hurricane Conditions expected not only tonight, but also tomorrow. Officials say that the surge could be a Once In A Lifetime event. Idalia is now a category two, with maximum winds of 110 miles per hour. It is now forecast to become a powerful category four, before landfall tomorrow morning. We have got to 49 florida counties that are under states of emergency as we speak and as they are waiting to see what the next few hours will bring. Well be covering everything as only cnn can tonight. We have got to teams out across the entire storm zone, weve got chad myers in the cnn winter center, Carlos Flores is in tampa, brian todd is in st. Marks
Don t have high populations, but they are very hard to get to. usually, you are talking about it to link road coming on the u.s. 27, u.s. 19. you are having to go 20, 30, 40 miles to get through these little committees, and all of that will be covered and debris, flooded. so, for the response it is really about if people haven t evacuated, they are prepared to go in and get to the survivors. but, it is going to be very difficult, and unlike other places this will not be a concentrated population. it will be very spread out. as you saw, basically north of tampa, especially when you get past north of guilford county, there are some good size populations, then it diminishes. search and rescue will be the first part, the second will be, we are going to have a lot of power outages. and this is a part of the state that has not have hurricane-force winds and a long time. you know, the idea of the preparation and what it will take to not only prepare for the storm itself but the aftermath, a