Sen. Nelson: People in Florida's Keys Region 'Tough'

The damages in Key West, Florida, are 'what you would expect with 120-mile-an-hour winds," but people in the Florida Keys are "tough," Sen. Bill Nelson said Monday.

"The great news is that most of them evacuated," Nelson told Fox News' "America's Newsroom" program. "There were only about 10,000 people left in the whole island chain. Most of the emergency personnel had moved up to the northernmost key, Key Largo. They are all getting back down the road now, back in."

The Florida Democrat and GOP Sen. Marco Rubio were traveling to the Keys together on Monday, and Nelson said before their trip that Hurricane Irma left the state needing a "lot of debris removal."

"We are fortunate to have beautiful trees, and a lot of those trees have toppled over and places are without power," Nelson said. "The integrity of the dike on Lake Okeechobee is fine. They have lost power out there, one of Florida power lines, the mainline snapped, so there is a lack of power out there. That's near the Lake Okeechobee. But there was no problem with the water pressure on the dike."

Nelson said he is proud of the people in his state, as they followed instructions and helped each other.

"I had no water here going in, any bottled water," Nelson said. "One of my neighbors came over and gave me water ahead of the storm. That is the kind of spirit that is going on here in Florida."

Nelson said he did not have an up-to-date report on Marco Island, but he does believe that it was fortunate that an expected storm surge did not occur in Naples, Fort Myers, or Tampa Bay.

"The water pushed out of those bays into the Gulf, because of the east-west winds," Nelson said. "What we feared was that the eye of the hurricane was going to stay right down in the Gulf and when the eye past, the water [would come] rushing back in with a huge tidal surge. Fortunately that did not happen. The eye moved onto the land somewhere around just before Fort Myers, and then stayed over land all the way up in between Orlando and Tampa, before taking a more north, northwest direction."

However, Jacksonville is experiencing dangerous flooding because of a combination of heavy rains and the counterclockwise winds from Irma.

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