Hurricane Isaias slams Florida Panhandle as a Category 2 storm, leaving hundreds of thousands without power

Hurricane Isaias came ashore on the Florida Panhandle on Friday night, making landfall near Destin at about 8:30 p.m. Central time with 105 mile per hour winds, a strong Category 2 storm that ripped trees from the ground, tore down power lines, and flooded roadways from Pensacola to the Alabama line.

The storm had spent the afternoon strengthening over the Gulf, peaking as a Category 3 with 120 mile per hour winds before losing some punch in the final hours. Saildrone Explorers working for NOAA passed through the storm offshore and recorded winds topping 103 miles per hour and wave heights of about 33 feet. By 4 a.m. Central on Saturday, Isaias had moved inland, sitting about 40 miles south southwest of Montgomery, Alabama, and had lost its tropical characteristics. The National Hurricane Center issued its final advisory on the storm, though it warned that flash flooding remained a threat.

The numbers from the night were stark. More than 450,000 customers in Florida lost power, most of them in five Panhandle counties, and at one point outages across the Southeast topped 760,000, stretching into southern Alabama and southwestern Georgia. Search and rescue crews began moving as soon as conditions allowed and worked through the night.

Florida lieutenant governor Jay Collins said the storm hit "like a freight train." He told Fox News that roughly 900,000 people had evacuated from the storm's path before landfall, and that early reports did not show the catastrophic damage seen in past Panhandle storms. Collins compared Isaias to Hurricane Michael, the Category 5 storm that devastated the region on October 10, 2018, almost exactly eight years earlier, and said this storm did not appear to be another Michael.

President Donald Trump, returning to the White House late Friday from a rally in upstate New York, told reporters the hurricane was "under control." Gov. Ron DeSantis had expanded a state of emergency to 27 counties ahead of the storm and warned that flash flooding would remain a hazard throughout the region.

The danger was not over at dawn. The storm's remnants were still producing heavy rain across Alabama and Georgia, and forecasters warned of a lingering tornado threat across the Florida Panhandle and into southern Georgia and South Carolina. Officials and residents were beginning the work of assessing the full scope of the damage.