Bill Cunningham, the Great America, and welcome this war. It's Friday afternoon of the tri State. The Bengals tee it up about nine am on Sunday morning, kick off about eight fifteen eight twenty pm, big game against the New York Football Giants. To say, it's a crisis if they lose. It would be a crisis if they lose, because this is a team picked by Mowager to win the Super Bowl and beyond. But instead of that, they're one in four And there's no team in the NFL that is
a worse record than the Bengals. There's a few one in four teams and the Bengals are one of them. So this could begin the renaissances. Rocky boyhim and said the other day that when he was with the Colts, they opened up one in four won the next ten in a row. Certainly the Bengals have the capability of
doing that and more. But until then the last few days have been somewhat remarkable when it comes to weather and when it comes to hurricanes, when it comes to Ian or Helene, or when it comes to Milton, and there's been lots of coverage even this morning watching news Nation and watching many other channels, it's the dominant story in the country and that as far as what's happening and how it happened, how to stop it from happening again,
what are the impacts? And one thing I found very informative is I watched the Mayor of Sarasota this morning on News Nation and he talked about the fact that there's not been a hurricane to hit Sarasota since nineteen sixty, which was during the presidency of Dwight D. Eisenhower. So this isn't exactly a regular event in Sarasota. Joining you and I now is Brian Innton. Brian Anton has a correspondent, has been on the scene with News Nation the last
several days. And Brian Anton, welcome again to the Bill Cunningham Show. And Brian this afternoon, can you tell us what's happening now? I know you're in Tampa, Sarasota. How's the recovery going?
Yeah, I appreciate you having me, Bill. It's moving along. You know, Florida.
I'm from Florida. I'm a Floridian. We're really good at responding to hurricanes. And I was just on the highway between Tampa and Sarasota. I mean, it's like the cavalry is coming in, all the linemen and the search and rescue teams and the construction crews.
So it's well underway.
There's still, you know, a lot of people without power, but that's improving greatly. The power restoration cruis are out, you know. I was in North Tampa near the University of South Florida yesterday where I mean there's just the whole neighborhood there is underwater and it's slowly starting to recede. They were doing rescues out there yesterday. Shout out to the Hillsboro County Sheriff's office. They did an amazing job. They saved like one hundred seniors from this senior living home.
There were no deaths.
But it's gonna be a clean up.
I mean, you know, when you get four or five feet of water in your house, you think about it. You got to throw everything away, all the dry wall has to go.
So it's gonna be quite a clean up process for all these folks in this part of the state.
And some of the best video you have is I've seen dumpsters on top of roofs. I've seen large alligators chewing on the tires of cars. I've seen little boys plucked out of deep water by rescue workers. It's at all hands on deck. Has been one or two two incidents that you've seen that you're gonna remember for a long time.
Yeah, you know, you mentioned I was in the neighborhood where they got the fourteen year old.
He was like hanging on to a.
Piece of wood that was again the Hillsborough County Sheriff's office. They rescued him yesterday. I won't forget that.
It's interesting, you know.
The only time I've covered a lot of these storms and you get in storm mode.
The only time I felt a little like that.
Little ping of emotion, like I was almost gonna get a little tiary again, was just seeing all the search and rescue crews driving in right after the storm ended. You know, they stage all over the state, and you got, you know, people that they want to do this, They want to do this work. They come from all over.
It's just so amazing what they do. People don't realize it, you know, because there's no power, it's hot, it's a terrible condition to work in, but they come from all over to help and I think I'll always I'll always remember that.
And the other the other issue which you don't think about are the critters. I see people walking and maybe an ankle deep water or mud or maybe a waiste deep. Talk about the critters that you might encounter in Florida that you don't have like in North Carolina.
Yeah, I mean, look, we got the gators everywhere here. Bill Florida is just one big swamp.
They say.
Everybody of water already has a gator in it. And when the water comes up like this, this neighborhood that I was just in where it's now just all underwater, the gators are there. There was video of a gator in someone's house. The house was flooded. They left the door open and there were the gator inside. All the snakes come out. Everything is disturbed, you know, all the things that live underground here, the snakes and crabs and the holes, they all come out.
Because it gets flooded. So you really do have to be careful of that.
I mean, you know, I had these stick boots on when I was walking in the floodwater. But even then you have to look where you walk. And that's a whole nother sort of.
Part of it.
You try not to think about it too much, but the gators are definitely amongst us.
You know, when you live in Cincinnati or Northern can tell you live in Boone County, you live in Dayton, Ohio, you don't think much about gators. And I've often told some that that's the up in the up and the down. The mountains and the valleys of life are available in Florida that unavailable other parts of the country. Kentucky had terrible incidents with tornadoes and flooding. It's awful, and the tornado is unpredictable, and maybe flooding is not really predictable,
but hurricanes are. And when you think about the fatigue factor, I've seen many talk in Florida about the fatigue factor that is. This is I had on several times the mayor of Fort Myers Beach, a good man, and I'm thinking about what he's gone through the last three or four years, and it's truly unbelievable, the fatigue factor of what one goes through. And in Florida that you don't have the fatigue factor. And since you're a Floridian, can you address the issue of why would I don't know,
twenty five million people live in Florida. When it seems this is a regular event, Why did that happen?
Yeah, it's such a good question.
You know, Fort Myers Beach by the Way has been slammed, and you're right. The mayor is a great guy, and it's a beautiful area there, but they've been hit hard the last couple of years.
I was thinking about that today.
It's interesting you asked me that, Bill, because people have asked me that too. Gosh, you have to worry the whole chunk of the year about these storms coming. Who would we even want to live there anymore? And then they come and they have the station.
I just love it here. I mean, you know, you've got eight months of the year that's beautiful. Everybody's jealous of you.
It's cold and snowing everywhere else in the country and we're here and it's seventy five degrees every day in blue sky.
Is a big chunk of the year.
So this is the payoff, and you know, there's a bonding that happens with these storms.
You know, even in the last couple of days, I realized it again. People are just so nice here.
After a hurricane everybody comes together as a Floridian.
Nobody, you know, you watch the national news, everybody's talking about politics.
Right now and global warming and this and that.
Nobody's talking about that. In Florida.
They're all just helping each other out right now and giving each other hot coffee and given each other generator and making sure their neighbors are okay. And in a way, after a storm, people on the outside are thinking like, oh, you'd want to get out of there. For me, it makes me think about how much I want to stay like it. Just I like Floridians. I like it here a Florida. Do you ever hear that term Florida man? Bill Like, I'm a Florida man, and I guess I'm just proud of it.
You know, Mother nature can be awful, but human beings can be so good. And when these events happen, it's like the best of humanity in the worst of mother nature meat and the human always wins in a sense over mother nature until the next storm and the next storm, and then it's, oh my god, here we go again. There's two more hurricanes out in the Atlantic now, I am told by Tony Bender and others don't worry about it,
that's gonna go north, gonna go east. But to have a hurricane form quickly in the western Gulf of Mexico and then they had to east at that rapid race and to become a category five hit at category three. I think this sand has talked about the other day is that that's not happened. It's very unusual. Every sixty five years it happened. But when it happens, boom about a boom bauta bing bauta, bang like you have with with Ian Helene and Milton, and there were two other storms.
When I talked to Mayor Dan Alllers of Fort Myers Beach yesterday, I talked to him also on Monday. Uh, he talked When I talked to him on Monday before the crises really hit, I said, what's going to happen? He said, well, we're probably going to have five to eight feet of storm surge that's going to envelop go over the top of the whole island for several hours, and then after that it's going to recede and we're going to rebuild. So I talked to him yesterday and uh,
and he was wonderful. He couldn't have been better about well, you know, everything is basically destroyed, every building is affected. We have we start to rebuild. It got up at about three o'clock in the morning after the storm passed, and I got here with my with my crew from the City of Fort Myers speech. We got to work. So the first thing we got to do. We have one to two feet of mud and sand everywhere. There's no
road that's passable. And so the first thing we got to do is get bulldozers and start getting this scrape scrape the roads, and then we we kind of get the utilities going. He said, within a week or two, we're gonna be functional again. Isn't that almost the attitude of the Alamo, in which, okay, we're Americans, but we're gonna cat And I thought most people would have to go through that, they would say I'm done, I've had it, not gonna do it. But that's that's not the Florida attitude.
No, it's not, especially if you live on those barrier islands. I mean, you know that you are vulnerable, so you've got plans in place, and and again you just you.
Have to cut through some of the red tape. I was listening to DeSantis this morning.
You know, they got all the bridges open right away that the storm passed through overnight and by the morning they were opening up all the major bridges because they had the bridge inspectors ready to go. You know, they weren't going to start at nine am the next morning and be able to just chill and come on over and do the whole bureaucratic thing. You know, they had them staged in hotels and ready to get out immediately when the storm passed and go inspect the bridges were
do you know how it is with some states. You know, they'd be out there seven hours later and make it. You know, they they'd all have to there'd be all this red tape to jump through. Just like with the dumps. They kept the dumps open twenty four hours ahead of the storm because there was still all this debris all over the place from Hurricane Helen. People had to get rid of that debris or it was going to fly
around and fly into their houses. So they said, you know what, we're keeping the dumps open twenty four hours and the dumps that were still closed that were locked. I don't know if you heard about this SHP flow to Highway Patrol. They chained their cars to the gates and they busted open the gates to one of these dumps so that people could keep dumping their debris, because you can't have bureaucracy when you've got a major hurricane coming I mean, or they're just going to have more problems.
Well, when you look at this from around the country, those watching listening in Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Kentucky, and I've heard so many people say that is stupid, why would you live there? But then on the other side of the coin, you get the benefits of living there, and the attitude is, well, that's fine, let's move on because those barrier islands have been there for centuries. Florida's been there for five thousand years. It's not going anywhere, and
the Floridian says, okay, let's go play golf. In fact, a couple friends of mine from where I belonged to a club in Naples, Florida. They're going to play golf today on the back nine cart path only, cart path only.
I said that.
He said, that's a major problem. I said, well, no, wait a minute, and it's like, okay, let's move on with life. And they will not let weather defeat them. And I think it began with Governor Jeb Bush. He was in power for eight years now the Santas. He institutionalized what's happened with hurricanes, and it's like, okay, now we know what to do.
Let's do it.
And if you're if you are hit by a series of tornadoes, you don't have things stayed ready to go, you don't have meals ready to eat, you don't have utilities. Ronda Santas has thirty thousand utility trucks. I didn't think there was not many left in the world. And so the Calvary came and today hitter is Friday afternoon. I would think by most of Florida by Monday or Tuesday. Will it be back to normal?
Yeah, I mean it will be, especially in the places that aren't. You know, there's certain areas where no matter what, no matter how many power trucks you have, they've got to get the water down.
The infrastructure is destroyed.
But yeah, most of them listen, they'll get the power on fast. And you mentioned Jeb Bush. You know the building codes. He was instrumental in standardizing the building codes across the entire state and starting during the Jeb Bush years. If you built anything in Florida, it's so strong. It's like you build the houses now here like bunkers. So when you see any new construction Jeb Bush and on, it's the houses are pretty much untouched. Even category category five.
The roofs don't blow off. The issue is still the water. You can't stop the water from getting in. But yeah, I mean, people are prepared here for the most part. I mean, look, if you just lost your house, you might not be as optimistic as I sound right now, but you know, hopefully you had insurance. And again, Floridians just kind of endure and people who make a choice to live in Florida and move here. I'm from here, I was born here, but I'm rare. I mean most,
that's so rare. Most people have moved here because they make the choice to live here. They like the culture, and you know, they the hurricanes kind of come with.
It a little bit.
Now.
Mayor Dan Allers is from Minnesota, and when Minnesota or Cincinnati has a say it was a foot of storm predicted, people come together. They shop to go to Kroger, get everything prepared, They get milk, they get their bread, they hunger down. There's a coming together because there's an outside crisis in which we have to come together. That happens in Florida all the time. Now, lastly, there was a question about global warming, asked to run Sanus and I
might play it later on again. He had a fabulous answer, can you going to summarize because the national media often wants to, you know, there has to be certain pigeon holding of certain events to fit in the category. And of course the category is global warming, and Republicans especially get global warming questions all the time. And probably the atmosphere and the environment is warming a degree or two
over the last one hundred and fifty years. But can you kind of summarize ron to Santas's answer when some reporters said, mister gavin or mister Gammon or mister gavinor went back global warming and he kind of gave an answer that was unbelievable.
Yeah, yeah, and you got to play it later.
Because it was good, and I won't do a justice, but he basically.
Said he went back and he was able to write on the spot to recount all of the major hurricanes that happened, you know, one hundred plus years ago that impacted Florida, including like the strongest hurricane ever I think was almost one hundred years ago, And he had the dates and everything in his answer, but he basically was just making the point like, look, we've been dealing with storms forever here, and in fact, these aren't even as strong as the ones that came long before global warming
was even a concern. And regardless of how you feel about global warming, look, I mean there's all sorts of stuff on both sides, and all sorts of scientists, But I guess I just never understand why these questions come up right during the crisis, Like, you know, people are literally still being pulled out of houses and we don't know who's dead and who's alive, and you've always got this one reporter that wants to talk about global warming, and I don't know, I mean just always seems like
isn't there a better time to do that? You know, It's just I don't know, like, isn't there something more important to ask the governor right in this moment when you know, have so many people don't have power, And it's just always kind of it's it's never a low. It's always it's always someone from some other place or someone with some agenda that I feel like doesn't really care about what's actually happening in Florida.
Brian Anton, thank you. And it's a perfect shut up because the trade winds coming off Africa, they have a long way to develop many times. Or in the Gulf of Mexico, it's hot water, it's summertime, it's been warm, and it's shallow. And here you have the Canadian plateaus, and you have the Mexican plateaus, and you have the two bumpers between the Alleghanies and the Rockies. Those are the tornadoes and the hurricanes have a perfect body of water to form. Hundreds of miles of open ocean that's
shallow and hot, and the winds begin to swirl. Here we go, you pick up the heat from the ocean, fantastic winds. They have to go somewhere. They pile into the golf coast somewhere. It's just the way nature is. It's kind of like nature's air conditioning. The reason that exists is it distributes different temperatures throughout the globe. And that's the purpose of a cyclone. The purpose of a hurricane is to take warm from the south and drive
it up to the north to moderate temperatures. It's kind of like God's air conditioning, and that's why it happens, and it's part of nature. But Harry Anton, give my best all the folks at the News Nation, especially Sean Compton, once again, thank you for coming on the Bill Cunningham Show. And Brian Anton. You're a great American and you're a great Floridian.
Well, I appreciate that. Thank you, Bill. It's nice to talk with you.
God bless America. Let's continue with more the line becomes available five one, three, seven, four, nine, seven thousand. Bill Cunningham getting ready for the Bengals on Sunday News Radio seven hundred WULW