Hurricane Isaias made landfall on Friday evening in the US state of Florida, the US National Hurricane Center (NHC) announced, with strong winds and flooding expected in its path. With sustained winds of 165 km/h, Isaias became a category 3 hurricane on the Saffir-Simpson scale of 5, according to the NHC.
Strong winds were already being felt before its arrival in the Florida city of Pensacola and its surroundings, noted an AFP journalist. The gusts had already torn off the roofs of some homes and businesses, according to the same source.
“We see the trees bending, we see the branches falling. Things are flying at full speed, and I've never seen such a strong wind before, so it's intense, it's scary,” Jonathan Ramos, 40, told AFP 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 is the first hurricane of the season in the Atlantic, where cyclonic activity, which began in early June and lasts until the end of November, has been unusually calm due to the El Niño climatic 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 during a press conference, saying he expected “considerable damage” in the coastal area of the northwest of the state. 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.
U.S. weather officials expected Isaias to lose intensity after making landfall, but urged people to take the risks seriously.
Oil production largely impacted
At the beginning of the afternoon, the first effects of the storm began to be felt in coastal regions, with violent wind gusts, according to the NHC. Several airports in Florida temporarily stopped flights 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. The hurricane also threatens an area with many refineries, which risks further disrupting a sector already under great strain due to wars in the Middle East and Ukraine.
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Isaias is the first hurricane to hit the continental United States in two years, as the 2025 hurricane season saw hurricanes more concentrated in the Caribbean. Despite the influence of El Niño, which works against the formation of cyclones in the Atlantic, there persist "certain pockets in which hurricanes can form", explains to AFP Marc Alessi, climatologist from the Union of Concerned Scientists. Especially since the surface temperatures of the Gulf of Mexico have reached “record levels due to climate change”, which could have allowed Isaias to draw the necessary energy “to transform into a major hurricane”, he notes.
By warming the seas, climate change makes the rapid intensification of such storms more likely and increases the risk of more powerful phenomena, scientists say.
