00:00With East AES less than 24 hours away from making impacts here in Panama City Beach,
00:05officials have now enforced what they're calling an involuntary evacuation.
00:09You can see over my shoulder a sailboat that was no match for winds.
00:14We believe that sailboat has been around since Hurricane Michael in 2018.
00:19And some interesting stories that have come out of this region are the changes that came after that devastating hurricane.
00:25One of them was the building codes in Bay County where we are.
00:30Now remember, the building codes in the state of Florida up until Michael had been the strongest in South Florida
00:36after Hurricane Andrew.
00:38But then when Category 5 Michael came through, the officials decided they had to make changes here as well.
00:43The building codes for most of these buildings was only rated to about 130 miles per hour.
00:49But of course, when catastrophic Michael brought in winds north of that in the 160 mile per hour range,
00:55officials realized they had to do some changing.
00:58So look at some of the homes around this area that are now up to that new enhanced building code.
01:03So tighter and more secure roofs, buildings, the four walls, much more secure.
01:09The windows higher rated, all thanks to the devastation left behind from Hurricane Michael.
01:15Folks in this area have been preparing for East AES.
01:18We have not seen a lot of boarded up buildings in this region.
01:22We'll be curious to see if that changes.
01:24A lot of folks still have a lot of bad memories from Michael and what it did to this region
01:30of the country over the last eight years or so.
01:33A lot of folks still have that hurricane memory that is core in their minds after such a devastation and
01:39devastating event.
01:41For now, though, we'll see how things will be changing, which will be pretty rapidly over the next 12 to
01:4624 hours.
01:46Reporting in Bay County, I'm Leslie Hudson for AccuWeather.
