The eyewall of Hurricane Isaias came ashore in the middle of Destin as a Category 2 storm with maximum sustained winds of 105 mph, Okaloosa Public Safety Director Patrick Maddox said Sunday.
- “We did get hit by a Category 2, 105 mile-an-hour max-sustained storm, smack in the middle of Destin,” Maddox said during a county livestream. “That’s where the eyewall came ashore.”
The storm quickly degraded as it moved forward, Maddox said, and its effects were not the same across Okaloosa County.
“The south end of the county, in some areas you would drive through and say it really wasn’t that bad, while the north end of the county might have catastrophic damage,” he said.
Where the strongest gusts went
Gov. Ron DeSantis described a similar pattern across the region at a press conference later Sunday in Milton. He said Isaias made landfall Friday night as “basically a strong Category 2 storm” and that wind shear changed where its strongest winds were felt.
“Because of the wind shear, you had this interesting dynamic where there was like a jet stream that went northwest,” DeSantis said. “So the storm entered in Okaloosa County. A lot of the real significant gusts were in Santa Rosa and in northeastern Escambia, and you see that with some of the damage and some of the debris.”…