Floridians fuel up at some of the last gas stations with fuel available before Milton arrives

With time running out before Hurricane Milton's landfall, people along Florida's west coast rushed to fill up on gas wherever stations still had some

Transcript

00:00Our team coverage continues right now with meteorologist Tony Laubach. He joins us live

00:05from Tampa, Florida with more on how residents are preparing for Milton.

00:10Tony, please just break down exactly what's happening there on the ground right now.

00:18Well, folks are busy getting all their final last-minute preparations done. We've seen quite

00:23a few folks in the Tampa Clearwater areas today basically getting all of that. We tell them rush

00:28their preparations to completion and that is a lot of what many of these folks were doing today.

00:34Many of them taking advantage of the nicer weather. Right now we've got a little bit

00:38of light rain falling. We've had a couple of storms that have popped up in the area

00:41and then moved out over the Gulf, so we are dealing with an occasional pop of thunder

00:46every now and again. But generally speaking, the weather's been very cooperative for folks

00:50to get some of that down. We'll show you some of that video out of the Clearwater area. This is on

00:54the other side of Tampa. Folks were getting gas at some of the last gas stations that were

01:01available to get fuel. Many of the gas stations out of fuel and have shut down ahead of Milton.

01:07Many, though, having to get that last-minute fuel in the few places that still had it. Many of them

01:12with the various grades of gas only having certain grades in. Some of them the high grade,

01:16some of them the low grade. And a lot of those folks were dealing with the workers that were

01:21also on their last minute preps as many of those folks were out finishing their work days ahead of

01:26their own evacuations. Well, I'm working. I am getting ready to leave for the storm. Headed to

01:32Orlando. I am in an evacuation zone, so you know, just got to be prepared. Never know what's going

01:36to happen. But everybody's been saying that there hasn't been a storm like this in over 100 years,

01:40which is kind of crazy. Thankfully, I got a buddy out in Deltona. You know,

01:43going to go hang there for a couple days and enjoy time over there.

01:46And, of course, we've been talking about this storm going to transverse the state of Florida,

01:53so this is going to be a much far-reaching disaster for a lot of folks, not just here in

01:58Tampa, Point South, and even up toward Orlando as this thing is going to rocket across the state

02:02and work its way back over the Atlantic. Myself and my producer, Rocky, will be here in the Tampa

02:08area. This is where we're going to hunker down for landfall tomorrow. Right now, we are expecting

02:13that to happen later in the evening, so we expect tomorrow to be a much different picture,

02:17Bree, as we are out and about tomorrow, not expecting to see near the amount of people

02:21that we saw out today. Hopefully, all of them finishing their evacuation plans and getting to

02:26the places of safety because tomorrow the weather is going to turn downhill in a hurry well before

02:31that storm makes landfall. Well, Tony, thank you so much for that update. And good to know,

02:38thank you so much for showing the gas situation there.