Isaias Is Downgraded, but 670,000 Are Still Without Power

Hurricane Isaias made landfall near Destin, Florida, at about 8 p.m. Eastern Time on Friday, October 9, as a Category 2 storm — hours after briefly strengthening to Category 3. It was the first storm of the 2026 Atlantic season. By the time it weakened to a post-tropical cyclone and moved north across the Southeast, four people were dead, two of them killed when trees fell on homes, and roughly 670,000 residents across Florida, Alabama, Georgia and Mississippi had lost power.

That outage count is not precise. Utility tracker PowerOutage.us put the figure above 697,000 customers across Florida, Alabama and Georgia alone. The two numbers measure overlapping but not identical things — residents versus customer accounts, four states versus three — and both were moving as restoration crews worked. What is not in dispute is the scale: hundreds of thousands of households entered the weekend without electricity.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis said the state had received no search and rescue requests shortly after landfall, a sign of limited immediate impact in the landfall zone. The National Hurricane Center still warned of storm surges, flash flooding, damaging winds and tornado risk across parts of the Southeast. In North Carolina, Governor Josh Stein and emergency management officials urged caution as the remnants crossed the state, citing flash flooding, gusty winds and isolated landslides in the western mountains.

That is the gap worth naming. A storm's official status describes its wind speed at a moment in time. It does not describe what the water is doing, how saturated the ground is, or how many people are waiting for the lights to come back on. Isaias went from Category 3 to post-tropical in roughly a day. The hazards did not follow it down at the same rate.

Power restoration timelines, the full extent of damage across five states, and whether the western North Carolina landslide risk materialises are all still open. So is the final accounting: four deaths are confirmed, and assessments continue.