DeSantis plans to tour Destin on Saturday afternoon.
TALLAHASSEE, Fla. —
More than 400,000 customers remain without electricity Saturday afternoon, and residents are cleaning up primarily from falling trees and debris after Hurricane Isaias struck Northwest Florida on Friday night.
At 8:30 a.m. EDT, Gov. Ron DeSantis was joined by Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier and Florida Division of Emergency Management Executive Director Jared Perdue at the State Emergency Operations Center in Tallahassee to provide updates on Florida’s ongoing response and recovery efforts.
At 2 p.m., the state officials gave an update from Fort Walton Beach after touring Okaloosa County.
ON THE RADAR LIVE: ISAIAS LANDFALL ALONG THE PANHANDLE #youtube #isaias #hurricane #floridaWatch on
Hurricane Isaias made landfall near Destin at approximately 9:30 p.m. EDT on Friday, October 9, as a Category 2 hurricane with maximum sustained winds of 105 mph. Wind gusts reached 116 mph near Santa Rosa Sound and 100 mph near Pensacola, while water levels in Panama City Beach rose approximately 5.6 feet above the average high tide level.
“The risk of flooding is still high,” DeSantis said Saturday afternoon. “Sometimes these things happen a day or two days after the storm goes through. So the flooding story is not over.”
After landfall, Isaias moved north through the western Florida Panhandle into southern Alabama, weakening into a post-tropical cyclone early Saturday morning.
Two people died in Escambia County, the sheriff’s office told CNN. One person was pinned under a tree that fell on a home and a person was found dead earlier in his garage, which was closed with a running generator inside.
Power outages
DeSantis confirmed that, as of 7 a.m., 448,000 accounts remained without power with widespread outages in some Northwestern Florida counties. At 2 p.m., DeSantis said it was down to 439,162 accounts.
As of 3 p.m., Poweroutage.us listed 417,037 customers without power.
Florida Power and Light had already restored power to more than 43,000 customers, or more than 12% of those affected, as of 12:30 p.m., the company said. An estimated 332,000 customers remain without power.
Reported outages included roughly 90% in Santa Rosa County, 89% in Holmes, 86% in Washington, 85% in Walton, 75% in Escambia and 53% in Okaloosa.
Florida has approximately 11.88 million electric customer accounts with FPL serving about half of them.
More than 16,000 utility workers had been staged before the storm, and crews began restoration work as early as 3 a.m., DeSantis in the morning. The restoration pace would become clearer after utilities assessed damage to their equipment and infrastructure, he said.
Damage, debris
“We’ll get everything back up and running and let people go on with their lives as soon as possible,” DeSantis said Saturday morning.
FDOT and Florida Highway Patrol crews cleared debris and inspected bridges overnight. By 8:30 a.m., all state-owned bridges had reopened, as well as Interstate 10 and U.S. 98.
Crews were still clearing smaller roads.
Northwest Florida Beaches International Airport had reopened to commercial traffic, DeSantis said. Destin-Fort Walton Beach Airport and Pensacola International Airport were closed Saturday morning.
Roads in Destin were flooded, and in nearby Pensacola, police warned residents to stay off the streets because of debris across roadways.
During the afternoon, DeSantis said structures in Okaloosa County “handled the storm very well but added: “The problem is that the storm knocked over a lot of trees, and so your house, the roof probably didn’t blow off on this. But if a tree fell on your house, then obviously that’s a very difficult situation.”
Northwest Florida Beaches International Airport had reopened to commercial traffic, DeSantis said. Destin-Fort Walton Beach Airport and Pensacola International Airport were closed Saturday morning.
Pensacola Mayor D.C. Reeves said the airport “took some damage.”
The following damage was reported by Associated Press: a hotel roof in Pensacola was blown off, a boathouse was flattened in Destin and the facade of a high-rise in Panama City Beach was ripped off.
Federal aid
On Friday night, the Federal Emergency Management Agency approved federal disaster assistance is available to Florida to supplement state, tribal and local response efforts.
President Donald Trump authorizes FEMA to coordinate all federal disaster relief efforts for Northwest Florida.
The assistance is for Escambia, Santa Rosa, Okaloosa and Walton counties, as well as Baker, Bay, Calhoun, Citrus, Columbia, Dixie, Franklin, Gadsden, Gilchrist, Gulf, Hamilton, Holmes, Jackson, Jefferson, Lafayette, Leon, Levy, Liberty, Madison, Suwannee, Taylor, Wakulla and Washington counties.
FEMA is authorized to identify, mobilize and provide at its discretion, equipment and resources necessary to alleviate the impacts of the emergency. Emergency protective measures, limited to direct federal assistance, will be provided at 75% federal funding.
Scams in the region
The state is deploying three “disaster fraud action strike teams” in affected areas to combat scammers “who think they can take advantage of innocent Floridians,” Florida State Fire Marshal and Chief Financial Officer Blaise Ingoglia said at a news conference Saturday afternoon.
Ingoglia warned of unlicensed contractors and insurance adjusters collecting deposits from people whose homes have been damaged. He urged residents not to sign any contracts without verifying people’s professional identities first.
“If you are a predator criminal and you want to take advantage of this situation and you want to manipulate it for your benefit, you’ve picked the wrong place in the state of Florida and you’ve picked particularly the wrong place in Okaloosa County,” Larry Keefe, commissioner of the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, said at the news conference.