Jenkins, Southwest Florida.
The rains have finally stopped and the floodwaters are beginning to recede.
And the resulting pictures and images of the devastation from Hurricane Ian
are truly a heart wrenching, the Washington post obtained some drone video.
We're gonna show it to you now.
And the drone video was taken a few hours ago above ports Charlotte Florida.
Port Charlotte is just North of Fort Myers,
it's near where the eye of Hurricane Ian roared ashore.
Port Charlotte had a population of 50,000 people,
thousands of homes that have been destroyed, thousands of
others will likely be unlivable following flood water several feet high.
Here's the headline from the Miami herald IAN's path of ruin Sanibel
bridge severed Gulf Coast cities flooded.
Rescues continue.
The Washington post headline reads historic damage as millions lose power.
Death toll remains unclear as Florida Governor DeSantis describes
flooding as one in 1500 year event.
In the body of the story, the post reports quote, Ian battered parts
of Florida's western coast, tearing down trees and power lines and
causing dangerous storm surges in parts of the state authorities in Fort Myers,
which was badly hit, said late Wednesday that parts of the city were under 3 to
4 ft of water to the South in Naples, half the streets are not passable due to
high water collier county warned in a tweet.
Utility companies say that more than 2.6 million people in Florida are now without
electricity and while state authorities have not yet released a death toll,
some of the public officials are worrying the number of people killed in this storm
is expected to be in the hundreds.
The storm is moving North and again, as the Washington post reported,
it is projected to bring potentially life threatening floods, storm surge in
winds to parts of Florida, Georgia and North and South Carolina as it makes its
way towards Northeastern Florida and then approaches the South Carolina coast.
On Friday, the governors of Virginia, Georgia, North Carolina and
South Carolina have declared states of emergency ahead of IAN's
expected shift in their direction in Fort Myers Florida and nearby areas.
While rescues are underway as we pointed out and several buildings Jake have
apparently been cut off, apparently including a local jail.
According to Lee County Sheriff's Office spokesperson, Anita Iriarte, the Sheriff's
office declined to evacuate inmates from its 457 bed downtown Fort Myers jail as
Hurricane Ian neared category 5 status and closed in on the area.
Lee County's own map indicates that the jail is in a mandatory evacuation zone.
In advance the storm's arrival in National Hurricane forecast suggested that downtown
Fort Myers would face the threat of a storm surge of 9 feet or more.
In update though, the Lee County Sheriff's has released a statement claiming
that the inmates at this particular downtown jail are safe, quote an abundance
of caution, inmates were relocated within the main jail to a higher floor.
Hurricane Ian hit Florida of course after hitting the Caribbean parts of
Puerto Rico and Cuba.
And coverage of the storm on Fox news has revealed a stunning, incredible amount of
ignorance that one of their main news anchors has about the Caribbean.
Martha MacCallum was talking about the impact of Hurricane Ian on some of
the islands in the Caribbean.
You will not see her face here, but
listen to what she said as she is covered by video.
>> They feel terrible for
people in Puerto Rico who were just hit in Cuba who were just hit.
Thank God we have better infrastructure in our country.
We've put a lot of investment into making sure that we're ready for
these things, but it's an act of nature.
>> And that of course is an act of stupidity.
Our country reporter Rico has been part of our country as a US territory for
more than 130 years.
Jake your thoughts?
>> Yeah, so first on the Maccllum and Sheriff stories.
So first a lot of Americans don't know that Puerto Rico is part of America and
that's because our government treats them that way.
And so when Florida gets hit, everyone's like my God Florida what's going on?
My heart goes out of Puerto Rico gets hit, it's an afterthought.
And by the way now the Florida got hit, nobody's even talking or
thinking about Puerto Rico.
And the infrastructure in Florida is better,
that's because we don't spend money in Puerto Rico,
even though it's a US territory because of people like Martha MacCallum.
The sheriff saying that out of an abundance of caution,
we've moved folks to the second floor.
That's not really an abundance of caution.
An abundance of caution would have been moving them out for sure and
you're supposed to have a plan to do that under normal series.
What if it was a fire?
A lot of an abundance of caution,
we moved them to the second floor where the fire also reached.
Okay, so but the main story here, of course, is about the Hurricane overall.
As they were just told you 500-year storm DeSantis says.
Unless 500 years just turned into 4 years, I think his math is questionable.
There was a Hurricane just as strong that hit Florida in 2018 and then there
was the 500 or the 1000 year storm that hit Houston a couple of years back.
I think that the war on math for Republicans have begun.
And of course the whole point there is they're trying to pretend that this is
just extraordinary and is not happening on a regular basis when of course it is.
So it's super important to be clear here,
especially with some Republicans in the audience because they're easily duped.
So Hurricanes that happened like this one or a weather event, okay.
Climate is over all right, or the patterns that we see that the cooling and
the heating of the air, the oceans, etcetera, right?
So you can't attribute any one weather event
specifically necessarily the climate and the changes in the climate.
But if you see the severity of the storm's picking up the severity of the droughts,
the fires, etcetera, as scientists have correctly predicted now for decades,
that is climate change.
So if you see just one dot like this hurricane and you say, well, ok, Jake,
that's not fair, that's just a weather event,
which is what every Republican online is saying now, just weather, right?
But if you see a pattern of dots and that shows you online like this
going through the roof, that is what scientists predicted.
That is the climate change that they're talking about.
Because if the climate change doesn't create storms or Hurricanes,
it intensifies them, right?
So, I think that that's part of what we're seeing here.
And then David to the political hypocrisy.
The scientists of course will say, my God,
I can't believe this, we've got to recover here, etcetera.
And then he'll turn around and take fossil fuel money the next day and
say that climate change doesn't exist.
But an even more stark hypocrisy is as he is praising
gigantic government handouts to Florida today.
He'll turn around tomorrow and say,
I can't believe the government does handouts.
>> Jenkins, they're also a political implication though,
just in terms of how the storm is handled, say, over the next couple of weeks.
And I harken back to you and I both remember Hurricane Katrina from 2005 and
the political damage, I mean at first everybody was like, yes,
rally around trying to rebuild and help everybody in New Orleans.
But within a couple of days when there was George w Bush flying over and
saying heck of a job around,
there was a clear political impact as a major US city essentially drowned.
If in fact the damage is catastrophic in the western part of Florida and
there are hundreds of deaths and a doesn't get immediately in there and
electricity doesn't get turned on for a while, does that have a drag on DeSantis?
And could it possibly I suppose, maybe even put a drag on some Democrats and
change a little bit of the focus for the 2022 midterms and possibly hurt Joe Biden.
>> Yeah, no, I don't think so.
And so I'll tell you why.
I think that we live in a post truth world.
Now, Hurricane was still in the truth world.
And so all the media agreed that Hurricane Katrina was handled poorly.
So the whole country agreed that Hurricane Katrina was handled poorly cause it was.
Now if Hurricane has handled poorly, well, we saw it in Texas,
when they had the lines freeze in the winter and people froze to death.
The Republicans just said, that's because of solar energy.
Solar energy isn't being used there, they privatized the energy industry there.
And that private company cut costs and let people freeze to death and
just made the government pay the costs.
But Fox News and everybody else went out there and said, no,
it's not the facts that you see,
it's these other lives were gonna tell you about how solar did it and wind did it.
Just totally made up and 40% of the country instantly believe them.
So since we live in that post truth world now, know all Tucker Carlson and
the other guys have to do is come out and say, Hurricanes are good.
What goddamn Dr Fauci created the Hurricane and he could have fixed this
Hurricane without rejected, but the liberals didn't take the ivermectin.
And so no, nothing has any political impact at all anymore.
Other than, yes, the critical small slice of independence left in the country and
that's our battlefield.
>> Yeah and I think I'm with you and it's a sort of a sad state of affairs cause
you'd like to think that our political leaders,
particularly in times of an emergency if they handle it well, they should be
rewarded if they handle it poorly, they should be held accountable for that.
But we'll see how things play out over the next couple of weeks.
>> Actually David, one more, >> Well go on,
>> Sorry, David one more thing.
I mean, you see DeSantis actually trying hard to handle this correctly, right?
So he's telling, hey, don't criticize Biden, let's get the money in.
And he seems like he's very active, I'm being fair, you see that?
Like I thought Abbott did a miserable job in Texas, but
DeSantis looks like he's at least trying hard, right?
I'm kind of surprised by it because remember he didn't mind killing his own
citizens at all during coronavirus, he bragged about it.
We're not gonna take precautions, Florida's gonna be the dumbest day, haha.
And then you saw numbers spike and
way more people died because he refused to protect his own citizens.
I guess the Hurricane is visible and a virus is not visible.
So maybe that makes a difference.
But there's some percentage chance, David at some point Republican governors just
go, it doesn't matter how visible it is.
Like a post truth world.
We'll just blame it on Bill Gates and by the way, Alex Jones already there.
He says, the government creates weather and it creates these storms, etcetera when
Alex Jones is there, Tucker Carlson's next and DeSantis is right after.
So this might be the last Hurricane that they even bother responding to the rest.
They'll just say it didn't exist or Fauci created it or
you could solve it with suntanning your crotch.
That's a literal remedy they have.
>> [LAUGH] Tucker Carlson in a famous Fox News documentary.