At least four people were killed, and hundreds of thousands of others lost power after Hurricane Isaias struck the Florida Panhandle late Friday night and raced into Alabama.
Two people died when trees fell onto homes in Escambia County, Fla., which includes Pensacola, and Birmingham, Ala., according to local officials. A man in Florida was found dead in his garage with a generator running, according to Gov. Ron DeSantis, indicating he might have died from carbon monoxide poisoning. A person in southeast Alabama died after a motor vehicle crash involving fallen trees in Barbour County, said Josh Johnson, a spokesman with the Alabama Emergency Management Agency.
Towns across the region suffered damage, and downed trees and power lines made some roads impassable.
But many residents of the Panhandle, which was hit with winds surpassing 100 miles per hour, were relieved when they ventured outside on Saturday morning.
Trees and fences had been toppled. Signs for restaurants and mini-golf courses had been knocked over, as had some R.V.s. Winds had crumpled garage doors and peeled away the siding and roofs on some homes.
The damage was bad, but nowhere near as catastrophic as many people had feared. Coastal flooding was less intense than had been predicted. “We got away with murder,” said David Gates, 60, who was out walking in Fort Walton Beach.
The hurricane made landfall in Destin, Fla., as a Category 2 storm, and was the first to hit the mainland United States in two years. It was downgraded to a post-tropical cyclone soon after midnight, but it was still bringing heavy rain to much of the Southeast on Saturday as it moved inland, churning along an expected track north through Alabama, Tennessee and Kentucky. Officials in the Carolinas warned residents there to prepare for possible flash flooding. The remnants of the storm will bring rain to the Northeast on Sunday and Monday.
Nearly 900,000 customers lost power in Florida, Alabama and Georgia, though about 200,000 had it restored by Saturday afternoon, according to PowerOutage.us, a tracking site.
Officials in Florida said on Saturday that they had not received reports of missing people. “We have not yet received any requests for search and rescue deployment, and I think that is an optimistic sign,” Mr. DeSantis said at a news conference.
The Atlantic hurricane season has been quiet this year; the last time that the first hurricane formed this late in the season was 1905. A major reason for the lull is the El Niño weather system, which typically suppresses hurricanes in the Atlantic, while feeding them in the Eastern Pacific.
On Saturday, two storms, Hurricane Simon and Tropical Storm Rachel, were headed toward Mexico and the American Southwest, bringing risks of flooding but also potential relief from a brutal Southern California heat wave.
Before Isaias, the last hurricane to hit the mainland United States was Milton, which made landfall in Florida in 2024.
In the Panhandle town of Mary Esther, Maria Hernandez, 75, and her son, Louis Hernandez, 59, said they had ridden out the hurricane in their weather-beaten house, which was built in 1968. A transformer exploded across the street during the storm, spooking their dogs, they said. A tree had blown down in the wind but missed the house. A feared storm surge that might have caused flooding never materialized.
“It’s gone through a lot of hurricanes,” Ms. Hernandez said of the house. “Thank God it’s still standing.”
Her son added that he intended to celebrate by collecting seashells at a nearby beach. “The best time to find them is after a hurricane,” he said.
Reporting was contributed by Amy Graff, Isabella Kwai, Judson Jones, Maia Spoto and Eduardo Medina.
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