Tropical Storm turns in to hurricane Hermine off the coasts of Florida
BANFIELD: State of emergency right now in Florida and much of Georgia as well, as ugly weather barrels towards those states and their coastlines. First, it could be the first hurricane to hit Florida in 11 years. And Florida's governor just gave a live update. Have a look at what he said.</s>GOV. RICK SCOTT, (R) FLORIDA: This is life-threatening. We have not had a hurricane in years. So many people have moved to our state, and we always have visitors. This storm, hurricane is life-threatening.</s>BANFIELD: Serious stuff. Meteorologist Chad Myers is watching the storm from CNN Severe Weather Center. So what's the story on landfall? Will it be a hurricane and when?</s>CHAD MYERS, CNN METEOROLOGIST: It likely will be a hurricane late tonight. It's still getting its act together, but, Ashleigh, the winds that will be hurricane strength may only be 10 or 20 miles wide. The rest of the storm will be a tropical storm. So if you're unlucky enough to be in that little window from maybe Apalachicola to about St. Mark's, you will feel hurricane-force winds. But if you're anywhere away from that, you're only going to feel a tropical storm. But what you're going to feel anyway is a storm surge of up to eight feet. What we have here is a day and a full of wind that blows the water this way and that has been blowing the water to the north. Kind of like if you try to cool off your coffee by blowing on the one side, you blow the coffee to the other side of the cup, that cup goes up. The level of the coffee is higher on one side than the other. Well, the level of the water is going to be higher here than down to the south, into the keys. It will be sucking some of that water away from the south gulf and pushing it into the northern gulf. And with that wind pushing it up into these estuaries, we're going to get surges of five to eight feet. That's the real threat that the Governor was talking about. It's a death -- it's a life and death, when you talk about that much water in your town or in your home, OK. So I lived this. I experienced this in hurricane Dennis. When Dennis moved well to the west, yet St. Mark's had about 15 feet of water in downtown and people were floating around in boats. Boats were floating out of the marinas and just landing everywhere. So that's the story for the first 12 hours or even 24 hours for now. Then the storm gets into Georgia and the Carolinas and it could really churn the coast here, make significant rip currents for the entire weekend and people want to go play because it's Labor Day. Then all of a sudden, it gets up here in New York, at least close to New York and it just stops. So that's two days. That's 48 hours' worth of nearly no movement. So can it wobble to the left? Can it wobble to the east, sure? Spaghetti models in pretty good agreement going to go across here. But notice what happens to spaghetti and my joke was, this has turned into to angel hair. We lost spaghetti because that is just going in every possible direction. It could go left. It could go right. The models are completely in disagreement when it bumps into a front that's up here. No one yet knows what it's going to do. So if you are anywhere from the Cape Hatteras area all the way up to Boston, just because it's hitting Florida now doesn't mean it couldn't be a hurricane again and hit the U.S. a second time. That's possible with this storm.</s>BANFIELD: Yeah, you know, if you're in your 20s now, you might have been 10 or so when Rita and Katrina and Wilma hit. And that's a big memory for a lot of people. All right, keep an eye on it and keep us updated through the day. Chad Myers, thank you for that from the extreme weather center for us. Programming note, in our next hour Governor Rick Scott is going to speak with CNN's Wolf Blitzer. He's going to talk about the hurricane preparations that are under way and just the notion that, look, it's been a long time. Get those memories fired up. It's serious stuff and it is life-threatening. Just ahead, we've been following every development in the Stanford rape case. And tomorrow there is a huge development. Brock Turner is set to get out of jail. And guess what, dozens and dozens of people are standing by to greet him. What kind of greeting do you think it will be? We're going to explain next.