Let's turn now to St. Petersburg, Florida, another major city in the path of the

storm. Mayor Ken Welch joins us now. Mr. Mayor, thank you for being with us.

I'm glad to be with you tonight. So you're there in St. Petersburg now. I understand you're at your city's emergency operation center.

Just tell us where you are right now and what's ahead? Well now you know we're playing a waiting game we're tracking the storm as it comes

Toward us we've you know locked down the city evacuated folks we've got thousands of folks in our

Emergency shelters and many more have left the thousands of

folks in our emergency shelters and many more have left the city or the county,

which is exactly what we asked them to do

to move out of the threat of the storm surge.

And so now we're waiting to see which way the storm actually tracks. As you know, a storm of this size, you know, 20 or 30 miles difference can make all the difference in the well in terms of the impact of storm surge, but we know we're going to be impacted by the broad wind field from this hurricane and we're bracing for that and ready to get into recovery tomorrow.

There's some predictions that say the storm surge if it

comes on a certain path could be as high as 15 feet which is just really

impossible to imagine. In a city like St. Petersburg, what would that do? What does that look like?

Well, there are areas where it would not be survivable. You know, we saw from Hurricane

Helene just two weeks ago what that impact would be that was a record breaking

Storm for us in terms of storm surge at you know six to seven feet we've never seen it that high and as you said Hurricane Milton has a potential to more than

double that and so I think that you know really got the attention of folks that

live in those low-lying areas and we evacuated areas A, B, and C and those folks have again moved out of

harms away which is a good thing.

So as long as folks are responsive to what we ask them to do in terms of moving away from that storm surge.

You know, not one life has to be lost from that and that's the most important thing.

The impacts of the

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