Storm chaser Aaron Rigsby found himself in familiar territory in the Florida panhandle on Jan. 21, but with weather that is anything but familiar there.
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00:00AccuWeather's preliminary estimate of total damage and economic loss for this once-in-a-generation storm
00:05are between 14 and 17 billion dollars. That was just released in the past hour
00:10from our data analytics team here at AccuWeather. Our coverage continues.
00:16With storm chaser Aaron Rigsby, he joins us live from Muskogee, Florida with an update. Aaron,
00:22you've just been following this storm, following the snow. What are things like there?
00:30Yeah, good evening guys. Well, I tell you, I can't believe I'm standing in front of the
00:34Welcome to Florida sign with about five to six inches of snow at my feet. I mean, it's just
00:39truly unbelievable. I'd never thought in my chasing career, and I've been chasing for 15 years now,
00:45that I would ever see this much snow on the ground in the Florida panhandle.
00:49I-10 is just beside me here, and it is almost impassable. If you have four-wheel drive or a
00:54jeep or something higher up, you're probably going to be fine, but conditions have really
00:59deteriorated. The snow is still coming down at a pretty moderate pace right now, heavy at times,
01:04but I tell you, the road conditions, I mean, they're going to be rough for at least the next 24
01:08to 48 hours, and I want to remind you something. Over the last four months,
01:11I've documented Hurricane Helene here. I've documented Hurricane Milton here. I saw the
01:16Northern Lights down by Fort Myers Beach, Florida, and now I'm standing in snow in the Florida
01:22panhandle. You want to talk about a whiplash of events over the last four months? I mean,
01:25it's just truly been unbelievable. That's absolutely wild, and back in the 1950s,
01:30there was a four-inch snow event in part of northern Florida. It appears that we broke the
01:36state snowfall record in Florida. Now, records like this aren't just taken at a whim, so this is
01:42going to be reviewed by a board of people there with the climate analysts and so forth, but
01:48it's likely that this is it, Florida's biggest snowstorm on record, and Aaron's there for it.
01:53Aaron, how are people responding to all this?
01:57Well, you know, guys, that's one good thing that's been out of the event is that a lot of
01:59folks did take this storm very seriously. There's been widespread businesses closed. Essentially,
02:05pretty much all the schools in this vicinity, in the Florida panhandle and into Alabama,
02:09Mississippi, and the New Orleans area have pretty much closed their doors at least today,
02:13and I would expect that to continue into tomorrow because this is a significant event for the North
02:18and the South. It's going to take time to clean this up. The highways are going to be priority
02:23number one, such as I-10, that main east-west artery, before they can work their way into these
02:28towns and get to these county highways, so it's going to be pretty rough conditions, but everyone's
02:31been in good spirits. They've been enjoying the snow, making snow angels, even snowboarding on
02:36the side of some of the hills, so people are taking advantage of the rare opportunity in this
02:40once-in-generational event because they'll probably never have it again. Yeah, that's the thing about
02:44storms like this. There's pros and cons to it. Storm chaser Erin Rigsby, thank you for that update.