As Hurricane Helene rapidly intensified on its way toward Florida on Sept. 25, first responders evacuated elderly residents from nursing homes to get them to safety.
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00:00We continue our team coverage right now with storm chaser Aaron Rigsby who joins us live now from Crawfordville, Florida, Aaron
00:09Yeah, good evening guys as you can see right here behind me this has been a common theme throughout the evening
00:13We've got boarded up windows here at the local auto zone and earlier
00:16They were open and since then you can see that it's been x'd out
00:20They are closing down and many businesses here are following suit
00:23Now the wind dixie is available until later on this evening before they do close their doors
00:28But walmart however has shut down their doors and a lot of folks that thought they were going to stay behind
00:32Are now packing up their bags and leaving now that we could be facing down the barrel of a category 4 hurricane
00:38And aaron we're going to be dealing with some huge huge impacts in this area
00:42uh, are there many people out and about since they closed up or
00:46Are many people basically gone at this point evacuating to higher ground or just hunkering in their own home?
00:54It appears that a lot of folks are taking this one very seriously
00:57There's still a decent amount of traffic going by but I can tell that they've had a lot of trailers and boats attached to them
01:03So I can tell that these are residents packing up and leaving a lot of the local businesses have shut down
01:07For the next day at least so not a lot of folks are going to have to report at work or coming home from work
01:12And have to pack things up last minute here
01:14I think everyone realized the caliber of this storm
01:16Which is what we've been so worried about all year with those volatile conditions that have existed over the gulf of mexico
01:21And unfortunately, jolene's going to be able to take full advantage of those as we draw closer to tomorrow evening
01:27And you've been sharing some footage of people in wheelchairs people in a slightly more advanced age in nursing homes at
01:35Retirement communities that have been getting some assistance in getting to safety
01:39What have you learned about some of those?
01:41Cases and maybe that place where you visited with the camera earlier today
01:45Is everybody out or was it just an option for some of the residents?
01:48So those particular folks were in a mandatory evacuation area
01:51So they were priority number one a lot of them were bound to wheelchairs and they had the local fire department
01:56To assist those and getting them onto charter buses and taking them well inland because that's going to be another thing that stands out
02:02With this particular hurricane the forward speed is going to be very fast upwards of 25 miles an hour
02:06So we're going to see impacts that we don't normally see a lot further inland and they're taking these folks either very far west
02:12Or very far east and as those drivers are getting closer to safety
02:15West or very far east and as those draw closer
02:18They're going to focus to the other priorities and making sure that none of these folks are staying behind
02:22Especially out on these little barrier islands like alligator point
02:26All right. We appreciate your reporting and be safe over the next 24 36 hours. Aaron rigsby
02:31We're going to be checking in with you quite a bit here throughout the course of hurricane. Helene closing in on the gulf coast of florida