LINDA WERTHEIMER, HOST:
Hurricane Irma has made landfall in Florida. And that's where our show's host, NPR's Lulu Garcia-Navarro, is today. She is in Miami. Lulu, where exactly are you? What can you tell us?
LULU GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:
Hi. I'm at the WLRN Miami Herald newsroom this morning. That's what you can hear around me - the reporters and editors covering Hurricane Irma. And for the latest, we're joined now by our colleague Tom Hudson from WLRN. Good morning, Tom.
TOM HUDSON, BYLINE: Good morning, Lulu. Thanks for having us.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: All right. Irma is a Category 4 - sustained winds of 135 mph. South Florida, as we know, is feeling the effects of the storm right now. Tell us the latest.
HUDSON: The latest is the eye wall is making connection with the lower Florida Keys as we speak right now. We're talking about an imminent landfall right now, as it is coming ashore. For folks who may know the Florida Keys - the iconic Seven Mile Bridge. It's been in movie after movie after movie. It is the visual that you think of with the beautiful, cobalt-blue Florida Strait water in the Florida Bay. That is a portion of where that eye wall is coming into land - connection with the land in Marathon. And the National Weather Service is warning now for the potential of catastrophic flooding from, essentially, the middle Keys all the way down to Key West.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: And what is the situation further inland?
HUDSON: Further inland in Dade County, we are feeling - beginning to feel, really, the worst of Hurricane Irma. Winds have picked up. We're near hurricane-force winds in a number of places. The storm is sheets of rain. We're seeing localized flooding. We're seeing storm surge impacts - not as bad as originally predicted just 24 hours ago. Those storm surge predictions, thankfully, for us in southeast Florida have been reduced. But that is not good news, however, to our friends, colleagues and loved ones over on the southwest coast near Naples and near Fort Myers.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Indeed. Tom, when we're looking at the storm right now, you've been talking to people on air. What have they been telling you?
HUDSON: You know, stories of escape, return and protection. That's what they've been telling us. This storm has been on South Florida's radar for the better part of two weeks now. And for a good chunk of time, it was Miami. It was Fort Lauderdale. It was Palm Beach. A lot of folks escaped, only to move to areas where the storm wound up wobbling to and decided to move back.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Exactly.
HUDSON: We've gotten some reports in Palm Beach County, for instance, of upwards of 300 new people into the shelters overnight. They think a chunk of those came from the west coast of Florida.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: All right. That's WLRN's Tom Hudson here with me in the newsroom. Thank you so much.
HUDSON: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.