Naples Fire Chief: Storm Surge Will Be Worse After the Eye Passes

SMITH: "I want to get to Naples instead. Fire chief in Naples, how are things, are you ready there?" 
SCHULDT: "Yeah, thanks for having us, Shepard. You are watch — we are watching the report from Steve. We are experiencing gusts at 120 miles an hour." 
SMITH: "Your people aren’t out and about, I hope?" 
SCHULDT: "No, we are doing nothing but staying in our stations. We do have reports of stations that are damaged so we are trying to make sure that we can assess our internal assets before we get out in the next 12 hours." 
SMITH: "Back in dinosaurs time, when the storm stats coming, neopolitanes don’t go running." 
SCHULDT: "Unfortunately there’s still a lot of people that are here and we are going to try to tend to them, unfortunately, right now we cannot make any headway out there in the streets. So we are asking everybody to find a safe place in their home and be with their families and we will get out as soon as we possibly can." 
SMITH: "We’ve just gotten video in. If you can take it in the control room. Just east where Steve is life in gulf of Mexico. Folks say that they have never seen anything like this. The water is rushing like a river under there." 
SCHULDT: "Yeah, I’m watching it actually what’s happening in the way the storm surge would be worst after the eye passes because of the counterrotation and we are on the west side of the peninsula. What you’re seeing is a lot of the tide waters moving out and then after the eye we are going to get the significant storm surge after. The district around Naples, we are expecting 15 to 20-foot storm surge." 
SMITH: "Marco island is down south from you, it sounds like if it holds and doesn’t wobble, Marco island will take this thing as a head-on and then will head up towards Naples. I would guess an hour later it will be at you. Do you have a sense of what’s to come in 120-miles-per-hour winds in 20 feet storm surge?" 
SCHULDT: "Our fire district sent to Marco island bridge. We have contact with both of those folks. We are looking at 45 minutes after that. But a storm surge of 10 to 15 feet really can be life-threatening. We are anticipating major structures or loss — loss to those structures and, of course, the increase in the height of waters is what’s going to be absolutely catastrophic. You know very well that corridor of 41 and Callier is very low and we don’t have the title surge in yet." 
SMITH: "The idea of 10 to 15-foot storm surge aboveground level, not sea level, aboveground level across the whole region it’s really stomach turning, it’s hard to believe that this is actually happening." 
SCHULDT: "Yeah, to put it in perspective, we have 15 fire stations in our district, last count we have about six of those who we had to via Kate — vacate before the storm gets here because we will lose apparatus and half of the force has been moved to higher grounds."