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  • South Florida prepares for a direct hit, Evacuating the bottom of the state proves a logistical nightmare.

  • This is a life threatening situation.

  • There's talk.

  • Starts will rush in and could kill you.

  • Category four Storm Making landfall is an extremely serious event, and in a place like Florida with many vulnerabilities and difficulties of evacuating people, I think it was appropriate.

  • On Friday, the eighth, Irma becomes the first Category five storm to hit Cuba in almost a century, and it's expected to hit the floor to maintain in less than 48 0 Irma's coming along through the channel north of Cuba, and we know that it's gonna get picked up by some upper level winds.

  • At some point there's an upper level Eddie this that's gonna pick it up and move it northward.

  • And the question is, when is Irma gonna meet that Eddie going?

  • No, Georgia were born up with every case, so we can have something to come back to.

  • If and when Irma hits the mainland United States as a category four or five, it will be the first time in recorded history that we have had two landfalls of category for five storms and that's unusual.

  • It's It's unprecedented 5.6 million people, more than 1/4 of Florida's population race to reach safe ground.

  • From a traffic planning standpoint, it's very difficult to provide adequate capacity to move that level of people on on Lee.

  • One road so we didn't know is that the East side of Florida that needs to move is the West side along the gulf that needs to move in addition to the keys.

  • How far North does it need to go?

  • So it almost looked like everybody needed to move.

  • It's just scary, you know, we want to get to higher ground.

  • Never had a cat.

  • Five never experienced it, and it's just scary what could happen.

  • I'm really worried because we don't really know which way it's going to go, and it's so large that we're hoping it doesn't follow us.

  • If we leave, there's chaos.

  • People scrambled to catch the last flight, terrifying reality.

  • Not everyone's going to escape.

  • I'm here for two days in airport.

  • I go in and they say they're gonna close it and I don't know what to do.

  • Some people decide to stay to ride out the storm, take it one day at a time, getting me last minute rush to buy lifesaving supplies, water, bread, batteries.

  • There was a lot of uncertainty where Emma was going to go early on after Irma started getting a little bit farther west and it looked like Miami might take the hit.

  • Then it was really troubling is within two major cities Houston.

  • Miami might be actually devastated within a week of each other.

  • Suddenly, scientists tracking Irma notice something totally unexpected.

  • It's I shift, pushing the storm away from Miami toward Florida's west coast morning.

  • Ah, it takes a long time to evacuate people from keys because there's one road out.

  • This exacerbates the problems of how do you plan on how you do something in an orderly fashion, with hazard like a hurricane approaching in the morning category?

  • For her probably storm surge is the wall of water that is being brought by the hurricane by its winds so that the more intense, the more powerful the hurricane, bigger the storm surge and the longer that hurricane is able to reside over water, we call that the fetch, the more ability it has to bring a stronger storm surge towards land.

  • So if you have a hurricane developed quickly offshore, come right on in.

  • There's not gonna be much storm surge.

  • But if you have a Category five like Irma taking, it's a long path across the Atlantic.

  • Those the type of storms that really have large storm surges.

  • Irma plows over the narrow stretch of islands in a matter of washing away entire sections, knocking out the power in the islands.

  • The keys are very susceptible to hurricanes because they're very low line.

  • Most of the keys highest elevation is six feet two meters.

  • Any storm surge over that will inundate the island, making it very difficult for people who stay in those locations to survive.

  • For those left behind water supplies immediately, Burma continues for much 3 35 story First Miami Escapes total Even though the I went over to the west coast of Florida, that surge impacted the east coast of Florida.

  • Dramatically.

  • 10 stories.

  • Downtown superstore has Naples.

  • Fort Myers put a brake wait.

  • Beach goers with this'd normally entirely underwater.

  • As you can see, we could walk out another 200 yards.

  • The dog seemed to be enjoying themselves is draining this unusual event looks like a very low time, but it's action.

  • So the circulation around hurricane as we know it is counterclockwise in the Northern Hemisphere that can have the effect of pulling water away from the coast.

  • If the flow is from land to water, there's going to be a tendency to actually lower the sea level.

  • And you could see this happening with Irma as it progressed up the west coast of Florida.

  • But in most places, the water came back in with quite a bit of force in terms of rapid rise to a state where there was actually a storm surge and inundation.

  • So most of those places that experienced a lowering of the water level it was only temporary.

South Florida prepares for a direct hit, Evacuating the bottom of the state proves a logistical nightmare.

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