Powerful winds and rain arrive in Apalachicola ahead of Helene

AccuWeather

AccuWeather's Bill Wadell reported live from Apalachicola, Florida, as conditions rapidly deteriorated before Hurricane Helene's landfall.

Transcript

00:00Our team coverage continues right now with Bill Waddell who's live in

00:03Apalachicola, Florida. Bill, the eyewall is going to be

00:06passing to your east, but still a very rough challenging night there in

00:11Apalachicola, not far from the center of this storm.

00:16Yeah, that's right, Jeff and Bernie. From my rough estimate it looks like what

00:2025 to 40 miles the eyewall is going to be passing

00:23off to our east. So again, the people who live here in Apalachicola, many of them

00:28did follow the mandatory evacuation orders,

00:30but there are some who stayed behind. People that love Apalachicola, they are

00:35breathing a sigh of relief. It appears that this town is going to

00:38avoid a direct hit from the worst of the impacts,

00:42but they're worried about their neighbors to the east. 20,

00:4530, 40 miles to the east, it is going to be an absolutely devastating night

00:49and we're still going to be dealing with some pretty serious impacts here in

00:52Apalachicola. You can see some of the water coming out

00:55of this harbor from the bay we saw during high tide earlier this morning.

01:00The water was actually up over here, up over parts of the street

01:04and it was blocked. You may actually be able to see by the pier, by the bridge,

01:07some of this water starting to come in. This is just the beginning of a very

01:11long night and we spoke with Senator Rick Scott. He

01:16has led Florida through quite a few number of big storms,

01:19hurricanes. He had a message for people with storm surge telling them

01:25they need to get to safety. It's too late now really at this point to

01:28evacuate, but he was very concerned about the growing likelihood that we

01:32could see a repeat of deadly storm surge impacts here in

01:36Florida. Water is so powerful. It is just deadly.

01:42If you look at our state now, because of our our building codes, a lot

01:47of this, a lot of our hurricanes now are water events,

01:50right? And so it's the water that's going to kill you. It's not the wind that's

01:54going to kill you. It's the water that's going to kill you.

02:01Yeah, and here in Appalachia, Florida, the power is still on for now. People have been

02:05told to prepare for the likelihood of extended power

02:08outages. One thing I do want to point out, we have not seen many utility trucks

02:13or utility crews stationed in this area and that's because

02:18many of them are stationed far away from the landfill

02:21and keep the crews safe and keep the equipment safe in the truck so they can get the job done, but

02:25we're going to be dealing with very tough conditions in the world. We're dealing with

02:28down streets, down power lines, roads possibly, bridges compromised. That's why we've been

02:34warning people. It's going to take a while to get the power back on.

02:37Of course, we're having some problems with his audio. He is on the western side of

02:42the eye wall. I want to take you to radar really quickly here.

02:46We've been talking with Leslie Hudson in Tampa. They're still getting

02:50a southwesterly wind, a damaging storm surge there. I want to take a look at

02:55this radar from the perspective of Tallahassee. We're getting a

02:59tremendous amount of lightning now in the northern side of this eye wall.

03:03I bring that up because I do think that means we're going to get strengthening

03:06and you can see where the landfall is going to be. It's going to be here

03:09in the Taylor County south and west of Perry.

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