Watch · Europa Wire
Hurricane Isaias made landfall near Destin, Florida, on Friday evening, sweeping ashore from the northern Gulf of Mexico as the first Atlantic hurricane of the 2026 season. The National Hurricane Center (NHC) in Miami said the center of the cyclone made landfall at 9.30pm ET as a category 2 hurricane. Forecasters had expected Isaias to weaken from its peak earlier on Friday as a major category 3 hurricane due to shifts in wind speed.
But even as high-end category 2 storm, the NHC said, severe impacts would be felt across a wide stretch of the northern Gulf coast from Louisiana to Florida, and far inland. They included a “life-threatening” storm surge of up to 7ft (2.1 meters) along the Alabama-Florida line, and powerful wind gusts reaching parts of northern Georgia. “Weakening will occur after landfall, but sustained hurricane-force winds will likely occur near and along Isaias’s track up to 100 miles inland,” wrote Robbie Berg, an NHC hurricane expert, in a Friday advisory.
The governors of Mississippi , Alabama, and Florida all declared states of emergency ahead of the storm’s arrival, urging some residents of coastal communities to evacuate and many more to prepare for the storm’s likely violent arrival. The Mobile office of the National Weather Service warned parts of Florida could see “extremely dangerous” tornado-like winds. By Friday evening, more than 400,000 customers had lost power across Alabama and Florida, according to poweroutage.com.
“Things are going to get really, really treacherous,” Jamie Rhome, deputy director for the National Hurricane Center, told the AP. Florida’s national guard deployed roughly 5,000 soldiers and airmen to aid with the response, the AP reported. Some prisons were also evacuating their incarcerated populations.
Most flights were grounded at several airports in Florida’s Panhandle. Isaias is notable as one of the two latest-forming Atlantic hurricanes on record, tying a record set on 8 October 1905. None of the eight previous named storms of the 2026 Atlantic season intensified above tropical storm status.
Ahead of the storm, oil and gas producers shut down a significant share of offshore production in the Gulf, which accounts for almost 15% of crude pumped annually in the US. The storm could also be the first major test of the ability of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) to deploy a large workforce after huge cuts and restructuring, emergency management experts warned. The Trump administration has said it wants to eliminate, or drastically downsize , Fema.
More than 4,300 employees left the agency in fiscal year 2025, about 17% of the workforce, according to a recent US government accountability office (GAO) report .
Source: The Guardian
