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American Morning
Interview with Max Mayfield
Aired October 03, 2002 - 08:02 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
BILL HEMMER, CNN ANCHOR: Not a sigh of relief this morning, but in the hours just before Lili was due to slam into the Gulf Coast, it weakened down from a category four to a category two. Still dangerous, still packing winds just below category three strength, right around 110 miles an hour of sustained winds. It carries a deadly storm surge, too.
We're being told a wall of water, possibly 20 feet high, may come ashore in some areas. As we have mentioned, we have reporters posted up and down the Gulf Coast.
This hour we're going to start with Jeff Flock, Jeff, again, live in Morgan City, Louisiana, tracking the storm from there -- Jeff, hello again.
JEFF FLOCK, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Bill, good morning to you again.
Indeed, it's really been blowing since we last talked. Perhaps you can see some of it in the trees behind me. And we can see some of what it wrought out here. I came around to the front of where we're holed up where. Perhaps you can see the two telephone poles. One snapped completely off. The other one, you know, apparently the ground gets so saturated here the other one just sort of got dragged down. That one hasn't snapped. That second one hasn't snapped yet, but that one is just pulled down as a result of the other one going down.
As you can see, as the sun begins to come up here, a lot of rain driven water and you really begin to see it up in the trees, the wind up in the trees here. And, again, we ought to be getting it just to the west of us. We are, the wind is, if you can see it in my face, is coming from the east and off to the west is where we think the eye will come at us. But, again, with the rotation of the storm, we're still going to get this wind from the east until it gets closer.
And even though, you know, we're going to get landfall to the south of us, it's still really not going to get us for a while because land is 20, you know, land, what passes for land down here is about 20 miles to the south from where we now stand. So a lot of water, a lot of wind, and probably more to come.
That's the latest from Morgan City -- Bill, back to you.
HEMMER: Good deal.
Jeff, thank you. Let's go further east now, French Quarter of New Orleans, and Chad Myers, who has made his way down there, as well -- Chad, what do you have for us?
CHAD MYERS, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Bill, the rain has stopped and what you have to think about, think about a hurricane like a saw, like a saw blade or a sign that just fell over. Think about it as a saw blade and every time the blade goes by you get wind and you get rain. But when your in between the teeth, you don't get as much. And that's really where we are now, we're in between the two teeth. We know we have another band still to our south and we just lost the band that went by here about 20 minutes ago, went up through the airport and in just 20 minutes an inch and a half of rain came down.
So if we had that here, we could get some flooding. The good news is it passed on by and passed on by rather quickly.
You talked about going from a category four to a category two. I want you to know that the difference is the spin of the center of the storm. Yesterday we had an eye wall about eight miles across. Today our eye wall is expanded and at times it even fell apart. But think if a skater. Think of an ice skater, a rather large ice skater, a thousand miles across. And as that person spins around with their arms out, they go rather slowly. But when they bring their arms in, they go much faster.
You've seen this on skating, on figure skating on Wide World of Sports. Well, the storm yesterday brought all the arms in and it was really going. Today, we're letting the arms out a little bit and so the spin of the storm, the spin of the center of the storm is less. The spin where we are is exactly the same as it would have been with a cat four or a cat two.
HEMMER: Chad, what accounts for that? Is it conditions within the storm itself? Or is it the fact that it moves closer to land that helps it to break up? What is it?
MYERS: It entrained a little bit of dry air from Texas that came in, and also, Isidore didn't leave the water in as good a shape as it could have been had there not been an Isidore. So thanks to Isidore, the water was just a few degrees cooler. There wasn't as much, you put regular in your car instead of the premium so the regular, the storm sputtered out a little bit. It didn't have the premium water and so it didn't keep going. That's what's up.
HEMMER: Got it.
Thank you, Chad.
Chad Myers in New Orleans, that's in the southeastern corner of the state.
We want to move across state right now, the southwestern corner, Ed Lavandera standby in Lake Charles -- how are your conditions, Ed? Good morning. ED LAVANDERA, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Bill, actually the conditions here in Lake Charles quite good this morning. No rain falling at the moment. The wind speeds are less than 20 miles per hour at this point. So any indications that the eye of hurricane Lili is supposed to pass about 50 to 60 miles to the east of us in Vermilion Bay is kind of hard to gather that that his actually happening based on the conditions that we're seeing right at this moment.
We've, we understand that the emergency officials here in Lake Charles are on a conference call with state emergency officials as they continue to gather up as much information as possible. They've also been making phone calls to some of the areas south of where we are. They've been reporting about 50 mile an hour winds and wind gusts of about 50 mile per hour, some sporadic rain, in a few places some downed trees.
We're here at, on the lake where the Harrah's Riverboat Casino is in Lake Charles, just along Interstate 10. And you can see what the sunrise is like here this morning. So the conditions quite good here at this point, Bill.
Back to you.
HEMMER: Ed, thank you.
We want to move further west. Late last night the word was it could hit Louisiana, might hit southeastern Texas, Port Charles, Texas is where we find Gary Tuchman -- Gary, hello.
GARY TUCHMAN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Bill, hello to you.
And the weather is just starting to deteriorate here. We come to you from the boardwalk here in Port Arthur, Texas, a boardwalk especially built for tourists. But the tourists are wisely staying away today because even though we're on the western end of the hurricane warning zone, the weather is expected to get quite bad in the next few hours.
Behind us you can see in this sea town, this is Lake Sabine. It flows into the Gulf of Mexico right nearby. And these are shrimpers that would normally be intermingling with oil tankers out in the Gulf. They are all staying in port today because of this weather.
It was October 13, 1999 the last hurricane to hit the United States, hurricane Irene. Now, October 3, 2002, hurricane Lili. And that's why so many people tell us here they are paying very close attention to this. Three hundred fifty thousand people in this county, Jefferson County, in the nearby county of Orange County, Texas, have been told to evacuate. It's voluntary. But we've been driving around here for the last 14 hours since we got here and the streets are very quiet. We don't see cars in the driveways. People are seeming to listen to this one -- Bill, back to you.
HEMMER: All right, Gary, thanks.
Gary, Ed, Jeff and Chad all standing by along the Gulf Coast. We'll be back in touch with them in a moment.
DARYN KAGAN, CNN ANCHOR: Yes, so Lili not exactly what we thought when you and I got up this morning, yet still a very serious hurricane.
We want to go now to the National Hurricane Center in Miami for the storm's current position and strength.
And for that, Max Mayfield doing the job for us, director of the center.
Max, good morning once again.
MAX MAYFIELD, NATIONAL HURRICANE CENTER: Good morning.
KAGAN: So we're still sticking at category two?
MAYFIELD: Yes, and that's really, really good news. At midnight last night we had a very powerful, 145 mile per hour category four hurricane. It has weakened rather dramatically. I don't want to overdue that because it's still, you know, 100 mile per hour wind and actually on the radar loop behind me you can see the eye wall is trying to reform again just to the south of Marsh Island.
KAGAN: So that means as it does get closer and closer to land that it might get even stronger? We're not done with the story yet?
MAYFIELD: Well, I don't think it's going to continue to weaken, at least for the next couple of hours. So there will be some very strong winds right in that inner eye wall that we're looking at. Fortunately, though, it is over Marsh Island. But it's still going to spread up into the Vermilion Bay area. The storm surge should spread up into there. Luckily the fact that it's weakened, those storm surge values will be down six, to more like six to 10 feet.
KAGAN: And what about that picture we're looking at over your left shoulder there, Max? That looks like it covers the entire state of Louisiana and then goes on into Texas.
MAYFIELD: Right. The rain bands go into, you know, the Port Arthur, Beaumont area and all the way over into the Mississippi coast. And the track has it continuing northward and then northeastward. So it'll go over most of east Louisiana and by this time tomorrow morning will be up in northwestern Mississippi.
KAGAN: It is heading north.
Thank you so much, Max Mayfield at the National Hurricane Center.
We will be checking with you throughout the morning.
Of course, this is affecting not just people who are in Texas or Louisiana, but people trying to get across the country. We want to get your travel forecast right now.
And Jaqui Jeras is at CNN Center in Atlanta -- Jacqui, good morning once again.
JACQUI JERAS, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Well, good morning, Daryn, and good morning, everyone.
Yes, travel is going to be a big problem in this part of the country. You're probably not going to be able to get in or out of New Orleans and we also have some reports out of the Houston area of some rerouting of flights to try and get around the hurricane itself.
So, and, of course, road travel not good and one of the big things to keep in mind if you are out and about at all today, A, you shouldn't be. But B, if you are, if you do come across any roads that are covered with water, don't drive through. Turn around, go back, find an alternate route, because that's very dangerous to drive through the water. It's very difficult to tell exactly how deep it is.
And the rainfall amounts are just starting to come in now. At the eight o'clock hour Eastern time we start getting some of the reports from this. And Boothville, Louisiana, which is right down here, Boothville reporting about six and a quarter inches of rainfall in the last 24 hours. New Orleans has about two and a third. And we have about two inches in New Iberia. And Slidell is under a flash flood warning. There's a chance of four to six inches of rain, and that's just in one hour's period of time.
Now, this is a category two hurricane packing winds of about 100 miles per hour. So smack dab in the middle of category two status, generally with category two hurricanes we see a storm surge of about six to eight feet. But we're expecting it to be a little bit higher than that here with Lili, about 10 to 14 feet. Rainfall estimates within the past should be about six to 10 inches.
What kind of damage can a category two do? Well, some damage is likely to small residents. Small trees will be blown down, along with a lot of shrubbery and considerable damage to mobile homes. This is not a place to be today. If you haven't evacuated your mobile home and you're in the path of the storm, you need to do so immediately and get to a safer shelter.
The forecast track has it hitting landfall likely within the next hour, Daryn. We'll keep you up to date on that.
KAGAN: All right. This will be the kind of mornings people like you wake up for, Jacqui.
JERAS: Yes.
KAGAN: Lots of work for you to do.
Great. Thank you so much.
TO ORDER A VIDEO OF THIS TRANSCRIPT, PLEASE CALL 800-CNN-NEWS OR USE OUR SECURE ONLINE ORDER FORM LOCATED AT www.fdch.com
Aired October 3, 2002 - 08:02 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
BILL HEMMER, CNN ANCHOR: Not a sigh of relief this morning, but in the hours just before Lili was due to slam into the Gulf Coast, it weakened down from a category four to a category two. Still dangerous, still packing winds just below category three strength, right around 110 miles an hour of sustained winds. It carries a deadly storm surge, too.
We're being told a wall of water, possibly 20 feet high, may come ashore in some areas. As we have mentioned, we have reporters posted up and down the Gulf Coast.
This hour we're going to start with Jeff Flock, Jeff, again, live in Morgan City, Louisiana, tracking the storm from there -- Jeff, hello again.
JEFF FLOCK, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Bill, good morning to you again.
Indeed, it's really been blowing since we last talked. Perhaps you can see some of it in the trees behind me. And we can see some of what it wrought out here. I came around to the front of where we're holed up where. Perhaps you can see the two telephone poles. One snapped completely off. The other one, you know, apparently the ground gets so saturated here the other one just sort of got dragged down. That one hasn't snapped. That second one hasn't snapped yet, but that one is just pulled down as a result of the other one going down.
As you can see, as the sun begins to come up here, a lot of rain driven water and you really begin to see it up in the trees, the wind up in the trees here. And, again, we ought to be getting it just to the west of us. We are, the wind is, if you can see it in my face, is coming from the east and off to the west is where we think the eye will come at us. But, again, with the rotation of the storm, we're still going to get this wind from the east until it gets closer.
And even though, you know, we're going to get landfall to the south of us, it's still really not going to get us for a while because land is 20, you know, land, what passes for land down here is about 20 miles to the south from where we now stand. So a lot of water, a lot of wind, and probably more to come.
That's the latest from Morgan City -- Bill, back to you.
HEMMER: Good deal.
Jeff, thank you. Let's go further east now, French Quarter of New Orleans, and Chad Myers, who has made his way down there, as well -- Chad, what do you have for us?
CHAD MYERS, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Bill, the rain has stopped and what you have to think about, think about a hurricane like a saw, like a saw blade or a sign that just fell over. Think about it as a saw blade and every time the blade goes by you get wind and you get rain. But when your in between the teeth, you don't get as much. And that's really where we are now, we're in between the two teeth. We know we have another band still to our south and we just lost the band that went by here about 20 minutes ago, went up through the airport and in just 20 minutes an inch and a half of rain came down.
So if we had that here, we could get some flooding. The good news is it passed on by and passed on by rather quickly.
You talked about going from a category four to a category two. I want you to know that the difference is the spin of the center of the storm. Yesterday we had an eye wall about eight miles across. Today our eye wall is expanded and at times it even fell apart. But think if a skater. Think of an ice skater, a rather large ice skater, a thousand miles across. And as that person spins around with their arms out, they go rather slowly. But when they bring their arms in, they go much faster.
You've seen this on skating, on figure skating on Wide World of Sports. Well, the storm yesterday brought all the arms in and it was really going. Today, we're letting the arms out a little bit and so the spin of the storm, the spin of the center of the storm is less. The spin where we are is exactly the same as it would have been with a cat four or a cat two.
HEMMER: Chad, what accounts for that? Is it conditions within the storm itself? Or is it the fact that it moves closer to land that helps it to break up? What is it?
MYERS: It entrained a little bit of dry air from Texas that came in, and also, Isidore didn't leave the water in as good a shape as it could have been had there not been an Isidore. So thanks to Isidore, the water was just a few degrees cooler. There wasn't as much, you put regular in your car instead of the premium so the regular, the storm sputtered out a little bit. It didn't have the premium water and so it didn't keep going. That's what's up.
HEMMER: Got it.
Thank you, Chad.
Chad Myers in New Orleans, that's in the southeastern corner of the state.
We want to move across state right now, the southwestern corner, Ed Lavandera standby in Lake Charles -- how are your conditions, Ed? Good morning. ED LAVANDERA, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Bill, actually the conditions here in Lake Charles quite good this morning. No rain falling at the moment. The wind speeds are less than 20 miles per hour at this point. So any indications that the eye of hurricane Lili is supposed to pass about 50 to 60 miles to the east of us in Vermilion Bay is kind of hard to gather that that his actually happening based on the conditions that we're seeing right at this moment.
We've, we understand that the emergency officials here in Lake Charles are on a conference call with state emergency officials as they continue to gather up as much information as possible. They've also been making phone calls to some of the areas south of where we are. They've been reporting about 50 mile an hour winds and wind gusts of about 50 mile per hour, some sporadic rain, in a few places some downed trees.
We're here at, on the lake where the Harrah's Riverboat Casino is in Lake Charles, just along Interstate 10. And you can see what the sunrise is like here this morning. So the conditions quite good here at this point, Bill.
Back to you.
HEMMER: Ed, thank you.
We want to move further west. Late last night the word was it could hit Louisiana, might hit southeastern Texas, Port Charles, Texas is where we find Gary Tuchman -- Gary, hello.
GARY TUCHMAN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Bill, hello to you.
And the weather is just starting to deteriorate here. We come to you from the boardwalk here in Port Arthur, Texas, a boardwalk especially built for tourists. But the tourists are wisely staying away today because even though we're on the western end of the hurricane warning zone, the weather is expected to get quite bad in the next few hours.
Behind us you can see in this sea town, this is Lake Sabine. It flows into the Gulf of Mexico right nearby. And these are shrimpers that would normally be intermingling with oil tankers out in the Gulf. They are all staying in port today because of this weather.
It was October 13, 1999 the last hurricane to hit the United States, hurricane Irene. Now, October 3, 2002, hurricane Lili. And that's why so many people tell us here they are paying very close attention to this. Three hundred fifty thousand people in this county, Jefferson County, in the nearby county of Orange County, Texas, have been told to evacuate. It's voluntary. But we've been driving around here for the last 14 hours since we got here and the streets are very quiet. We don't see cars in the driveways. People are seeming to listen to this one -- Bill, back to you.
HEMMER: All right, Gary, thanks.
Gary, Ed, Jeff and Chad all standing by along the Gulf Coast. We'll be back in touch with them in a moment.
DARYN KAGAN, CNN ANCHOR: Yes, so Lili not exactly what we thought when you and I got up this morning, yet still a very serious hurricane.
We want to go now to the National Hurricane Center in Miami for the storm's current position and strength.
And for that, Max Mayfield doing the job for us, director of the center.
Max, good morning once again.
MAX MAYFIELD, NATIONAL HURRICANE CENTER: Good morning.
KAGAN: So we're still sticking at category two?
MAYFIELD: Yes, and that's really, really good news. At midnight last night we had a very powerful, 145 mile per hour category four hurricane. It has weakened rather dramatically. I don't want to overdue that because it's still, you know, 100 mile per hour wind and actually on the radar loop behind me you can see the eye wall is trying to reform again just to the south of Marsh Island.
KAGAN: So that means as it does get closer and closer to land that it might get even stronger? We're not done with the story yet?
MAYFIELD: Well, I don't think it's going to continue to weaken, at least for the next couple of hours. So there will be some very strong winds right in that inner eye wall that we're looking at. Fortunately, though, it is over Marsh Island. But it's still going to spread up into the Vermilion Bay area. The storm surge should spread up into there. Luckily the fact that it's weakened, those storm surge values will be down six, to more like six to 10 feet.
KAGAN: And what about that picture we're looking at over your left shoulder there, Max? That looks like it covers the entire state of Louisiana and then goes on into Texas.
MAYFIELD: Right. The rain bands go into, you know, the Port Arthur, Beaumont area and all the way over into the Mississippi coast. And the track has it continuing northward and then northeastward. So it'll go over most of east Louisiana and by this time tomorrow morning will be up in northwestern Mississippi.
KAGAN: It is heading north.
Thank you so much, Max Mayfield at the National Hurricane Center.
We will be checking with you throughout the morning.
Of course, this is affecting not just people who are in Texas or Louisiana, but people trying to get across the country. We want to get your travel forecast right now.
And Jaqui Jeras is at CNN Center in Atlanta -- Jacqui, good morning once again.
JACQUI JERAS, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Well, good morning, Daryn, and good morning, everyone.
Yes, travel is going to be a big problem in this part of the country. You're probably not going to be able to get in or out of New Orleans and we also have some reports out of the Houston area of some rerouting of flights to try and get around the hurricane itself.
So, and, of course, road travel not good and one of the big things to keep in mind if you are out and about at all today, A, you shouldn't be. But B, if you are, if you do come across any roads that are covered with water, don't drive through. Turn around, go back, find an alternate route, because that's very dangerous to drive through the water. It's very difficult to tell exactly how deep it is.
And the rainfall amounts are just starting to come in now. At the eight o'clock hour Eastern time we start getting some of the reports from this. And Boothville, Louisiana, which is right down here, Boothville reporting about six and a quarter inches of rainfall in the last 24 hours. New Orleans has about two and a third. And we have about two inches in New Iberia. And Slidell is under a flash flood warning. There's a chance of four to six inches of rain, and that's just in one hour's period of time.
Now, this is a category two hurricane packing winds of about 100 miles per hour. So smack dab in the middle of category two status, generally with category two hurricanes we see a storm surge of about six to eight feet. But we're expecting it to be a little bit higher than that here with Lili, about 10 to 14 feet. Rainfall estimates within the past should be about six to 10 inches.
What kind of damage can a category two do? Well, some damage is likely to small residents. Small trees will be blown down, along with a lot of shrubbery and considerable damage to mobile homes. This is not a place to be today. If you haven't evacuated your mobile home and you're in the path of the storm, you need to do so immediately and get to a safer shelter.
The forecast track has it hitting landfall likely within the next hour, Daryn. We'll keep you up to date on that.
KAGAN: All right. This will be the kind of mornings people like you wake up for, Jacqui.
JERAS: Yes.
KAGAN: Lots of work for you to do.
Great. Thank you so much.
TO ORDER A VIDEO OF THIS TRANSCRIPT, PLEASE CALL 800-CNN-NEWS OR USE OUR SECURE ONLINE ORDER FORM LOCATED AT www.fdch.com
