00:00Tell us about what you witnessed when the eye of a barrel came right over
00:06Karaku a couple of days ago. Well leading up to the storm before the eye got there
00:12it was remarkably slow for a hurricane. The winds were not bad at all. The eye
00:19was 30 miles away and we were barely getting tropical storm force gusts. Just
00:25felt like a breezy windy day with some rain and the eye wall hit. It went from
00:31zero to a hundred and fifty just like that. It was just instantaneous almost.
00:35The eye wall itself was probably not probably it was the most intense
00:40hurricane I've ever been in. I've been in a lot of a lot of intense ones from Irma,
00:46Maria, Harvey, Michael. This one just was on another level.
00:51Debris just filled the air. Saw pine palm trees which are usually extremely
00:57you know bendable and and flexible just start breaking and falling and roofs
01:04flying off and the sound of just debris. It sounded like like you would hear in a
01:09tornado. Just so much debris coming. Thankfully the storm was so compact and
01:13moving quickly that the most intense part of the eye wall only lasted about
01:1815 minutes but during that process it took the roof off of the hotel we were
01:23in. We had to get up in the closet and I had a closet with an extra overhead
01:29space that offered some shelter with some doors. Managed to ride out the last
01:34couple minutes in there before the eye. Once the eye was there we were able to
01:37get out go to a safer room. I was able to put the drone up get get some damage
01:42footage. We were assessing on the ground what it was like. Trying to warn the one
01:46of the people there that this was just an eye we're not over with and the back
01:49side of the eye has always been in my experience the most dangerous part
01:53because all the debris that gets knocked off on the front part of the eye it's
01:58all loose already and everything is bent one way and then when the wind comes
02:01back the opposite direction all that debris at once gets picked up and pushed
02:05over. All the stuff that's been bent one way is now being bent back the
02:09other way and snapping and breaking. So that's when you get all the debris
02:12loading. That was definitely the case in Vero and the first 10 minutes
02:18after that eye passed was just absolute insanity. And really quickly Brandon I
02:25understand that you've been a big help to the people down there. Yeah so we had
02:32a brought a Starlink unit. I was able I was one of the first ones to get a
02:35Starlink mini which is a lower power version of the Starlink more portable.
02:39Brought it with us when the comms went down the island the cell phones went
02:43down the electricity grid went down even the ham radios everything was down. So I
02:49was the only person on the whole island with with internet and Toms for a while
02:52and we set the Starlink up and we're going around the island we'd set up went
02:57to the hospital and to the emergency management the police station and then
03:00other pockets of other communities and set up a Starlink open the Wi-Fi up
03:04asked everybody to limit it to voice and text but to call family members let
03:08everybody know they're okay and let them spread the word. And at one point I
03:12think we had 93 people hooked up to the Wi-Fi on one stop and we would just do
03:1510 to 15 minutes per stop to try and give as many people access as possible.
03:18And I understand that you've had some communication with the Prime Minister.
03:24Yeah Prime Minister actually called me on whatsapp at 10 p.m. after the storm
03:28he's like hey thank God I can talk to somebody on the island you're the only
03:31person I've been able to get in touch with. He realized you know my experience
03:36in these types of situations asked me what they needed first what the areas
03:41were like what the people were doing who where we could go to get get the
03:47Starlink in contact with them the next day to best organize their their their
03:51response. He was amazingly communicative for what was needed on the
03:58ground and listened which was impressive. The next day he comes in he flew in the
04:03next morning we met our next afternoon we met him at the airport there. He was
04:08super kind. Starlink ran out of data because we gave you know we're letting
04:12everybody use our data. We couldn't re-up until we got back to an internet
04:15connection. So he was nice enough to let us have access to get back to the island
04:20on his plane and we were able to get out last night to continue reporting on on
04:25the hurricane.
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