‘There will be impacts,’ DeSantis warns as Hurricane Isaias approaches North Florida

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said Thursday that state emergency planners are preparing for Hurricane Isaias to make landfall as a Category 3 storm near the Florida Panhandle.

The National Hurricane Center (NHC) said at 11 a.m. Eastern Time that Isaias is expected to strengthen as it moves towards the Gulf Coast and had reached an intensity of 85 mph. The center of Isaias was about 500 miles south-southwest of Pensacola at that time.

The NHC expects Isaias to become a Category 2 storm Friday morning, with most models showing it peaking as a high-end Category 1 to a low-end Category 3 hurricane.

Speaking from the State Emergency Operations Center in Tallahassee at 2 p.m., DeSantis said  the state was expected to experience wind impacts as early as Friday afternoon, with landfall projected for late Friday night into early Saturday morning.

“It’s moving quickly,” he said. “There will be impacts all across the Florida Panhandle.”

The way the storm was tracking, DeSantis said, most of the hurricane models place landfall somewhere between Mobile Bay in Alabama and Navarre, in the western Florida Panhandle.

Florida Department of Transportation Secretary Jared Perdue said storm surge from Isaias is forecast to range from five to seven feet.

Mandatory evacuations have already begun in Franklin County, and for residents in Fort Walton County who live in zones A, B, and C began as of noon Thursday Central Time.

The Division of Emergency Management was prepared for the storm, DeSantis said. It has assembled more than 1,000 generators that are either being loaned or staged; 500,000 gallons of gasoline; 1 million gallons of diesel, and 35,000 gallons of aviation fuel. More than 1.1 million bottles of water are available to be distributed.

More than 6,000 utility linemen and restoration personnel were standing by to restore power as quickly and as safely as possible.

Residents in northwest Florida who want to know the most up to school closures can go to https://www.fldoe.org/em-response/storm-info.stml.

For road closures, they can go to https://fl511.com/region/Panhandle.