“Tragically, we can confirm that one person has died after a tree fell on a home,” Jefferson County, Alabama, emergency services said in a statement.
In the neighboring state of Florida, the most affected by Isaias, another person also died after a tree fell on a house, announced the sheriff of Escambia County.
More than 800,000 homes and businesses were without electricity on Saturday morning in the southern United States, including almost 440,000 in Florida alone and more than 265,000 in Alabama, according to the specialist site poweroutage.us.
Isaias, however, decreased in intensity on Saturday, from a hurricane to a post-tropical cyclone, after making landfall in Florida, where it hit the Gulf Coast with heavy rains and strong winds, according to the US National Hurricane Center (NHC). Before being downgraded, Isaias was a category 2 hurricane on the Saffir-Simpson scale of 5, with sustained winds of 165 km/h.
The gusts had already torn off the roofs of certain homes and businesses in the Florida city of Pensacola and its surroundings, noted a journalist.
“Scary”
“We see the trees bending, we see the branches falling. Things are flying at full speed, and I’ve never seen wind this strong before, so it’s intense, it’s scary,” said Jonathan Ramos, 40, from Pensacola.
Faced with the risk of destructive winds, violent waves and colossal rains, several states bordering the Gulf of Mexico, including Florida and Alabama, declared a state of emergency and ordered evacuations.
Isaias was the first hurricane of the season in the Atlantic, where cyclonic activity, which began in early June and lasted until the end of November, was unusually calm due to the El Niño weather phenomenon.
By modifying large-scale atmospheric circulation, El Niño tends to slow down cyclones in the Atlantic and on the contrary strengthen them in the Pacific, where three maximum category hurricanes have been recorded this year.
“We are taking this storm very, very seriously,” assured Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.
Donald Trump announced that he was canceling his visit to the neighboring state of Alabama on Saturday, where he was to attend an American football match.
Several airports in Florida had temporarily stopped flights on Friday and employees of numerous oil platforms, notably belonging to the Chevron and Shell companies, were evacuated.
Around two thirds of the region’s oil production capacity and more than half of the gas production capacity were suspended on Friday, according to an American agency. That’s nearly 1.5 million barrels of crude oil per day removed from the world market.
Isaias threatened an area with many refineries, which risks further disrupting a sector already under great strain due to wars in the Middle East and Ukraine.
