Residents in northwest Florida cautiously ventured out on Saturday morning to inspect the damage caused by Hurricane Isaias. Plenty of 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 on some upscale vacation homes on stilts.
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.
Across the Florida Panhandle, residents breathed a sigh of relief, just hours after Hurricane Isaias made landfall on Friday night near Destin as a Category 2 hurricane, with winds of up to 105 miles per hour.
Swarms of workers who stayed overnight in local hotels rumbled out in giant trucks early Saturday to clear debris from the roads. By sunrise, the roads and bridges were all passable in this region, which is normally teeming with tourists.
“It’s all right. Just a little cleanup,” Amanda Lyles, 47, said as she walked through a park strewn with broken branches in Fort Walton Beach, where sailboats and docks remained upright.
In the 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.” Mr. Hernandez 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.
The storm proved fatal for at least one person in Florida: A woman was killed by a falling tree in Escambia County, home to Pensacola, officials said.
Still, officials said they had not gotten reports of missing people. “We have not yet received any requests for search and rescue deployment, and I think that is an optimistic sign,” Gov. Ron DeSantis said at a news conference on Saturday.
There were certainly pockets of greater devastation, particularly west of Destin in Gulf Breeze, Fla., which was also battered by Hurricane Sally in 2020.
Along the main highway there, an abandoned travel trailer had been ripped apart by the wind, leaving only a pile of debris. An enormous pine tree had snapped off and crushed a vacant manufactured home.
A few miles away, Theresa Harris, 36, and her family had waited out the storm in their home on Pensacola Bay. She said the storm was unusual because the winds whipped down from the north, not from the south as is usually the case during hurricanes. Fallen trees crushed part of her family’s fence line. But her dock was intact and her three horses survived unscathed.
“Our house is OK, but it was a little scary,” Ms. Harris said.
By late morning on Saturday, signs of normalcy returned to Gulf Breeze. Children walked their dogs past giant fallen oak trees. Cell service returned in spots. A Publix supermarket and gas station reopened. So did a Lowe’s hardware store, where residents waited in line to buy cleanup supplies.
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