AccuWeather's Tony Laubach reported live from Crawfordville, Florida, on the evening of Sept. 25, as people finished boarding homes and rain began falling about 24 hours before landfall.
Category
🗞
NewsTranscript
00:00So, our team coverage continues here. AccuWeather storm chaser meteorologist Tony Laubach is
00:05live in Crawfordville, Florida with more on how people and communities are preparing for
00:10this storm. Tony, are people taking this one seriously?
00:17Straight answer, Jeff. Yes, we are definitely seeing that. In fact, I would almost go out
00:22on a limb to say probably more serious than I would have given credit for. So, good for
00:25folks here in the Florida Panhandle. It's easy sometimes to get a little complacent
00:30when we talk about these systems and we get that a lot with storms. This one is striking
00:34a chord with folks though. Right now, we were talking, Jeff, if you remember 24 hours ago
00:38I was standing on a beach in bright sunshine. You would have had no idea anything was happening.
00:43Now, literally in the course of the live hit here, we are seeing some rain come down here.
00:47I would almost call this maybe like a baby squall. Not really seeing a whole lot of heavy
00:52rain but just enough to where it's an inconvenience to the live shot because we don't have the
00:56rain gear out because it wasn't raining when we started this out. A little bit of a breeze
01:00but definitely a step or two down from where we were about this time yesterday. Now, of
01:05course, this time tomorrow, we're going to be like off the cliff in terms of how deteriorated
01:11the conditions are going to get. In fact, deteriorating is probably taking a little
01:14lightning. I think we're going to be talking about maybe near catastrophic conditions for
01:18a lot of these areas as we get into the evening tomorrow. But today has been all about prep
01:23work and we've been seeing folks, those that were left this morning and this afternoon,
01:28they were taking care of the last second boarding up. They were taking care of the last second
01:32sandbags. We ran into just a couple of residents in what was pretty much ghost towns there
01:37along St. George Island, Apalachicola. Not many folks left. There were more emergency
01:41crews, media, and storm chasers than there were any residents by this point. But a lot
01:46of them taking those last second preparations. We ran into one particular gentleman who owns
01:51a company whose job is basically to come out and board up the houses of the folks out there
01:57that have left ahead of Helene.
01:59Basically, I'm just securing their home, making sure their windows and stuff is boarded up
02:06as I can. I've went to several clients that didn't even ask me to secure their homes and
02:11went and put shutters up for repeat customers. I don't know. I'm having a feeling we're really
02:16going to get a bad storm.
02:22And you heard him there. He's talking about it again. A lot of these folks have been here
02:25for years and years of years, have dealt with the Ians and the Michaels, and that has been
02:29names we've heard come up time and time again in terms of talking to a lot of these people.
02:34They're taking this storm very, very seriously. We're actually in the parking lot of one of
02:38the grocery stores here in Crawfordville. There are eight cars in the parking lot right
02:43now, just not many folks out. Everybody's already taken all the precautions, hopefully
02:47done everything they needed to do. We know the mandatory evacuations for a lot of these
02:51areas took into effect early this morning, so people taking it seriously. And we are
02:56now getting into the time of this system where you're going to wake up tomorrow and it is
03:01going to be ride it out or hopefully just not be here to deal with it in the first place.
03:04That's well said there, Tony. And we're going to be checking back with you later this evening
03:08as well and plenty of times tomorrow as well.