Outages and hazards persist after landfall
Hurricane Isaias made landfall near Destin, Florida, as a Category 2 storm early Saturday before weakening to a post-tropical cyclone. Reuters reported that four people died and about 670,000 customers across four states remained without power around midday.
Florida accounted for about 420,000 of the outages, followed by 190,000 in Alabama, 43,000 in Georgia and 17,000 in Mississippi. The National Hurricane Center warned that storm surge, flash flooding, damaging winds and tornadoes remained possible across parts of the Southeast even as the system weakened. Florida officials prioritized power restoration, while crews assessed damage and reopened some roads, bridges and airports.
Gulf production remains heavily curtailed
About 69% of oil output and 57% of natural-gas production in the U.S. Gulf of Mexico remained shut Saturday, according to the Marine Minerals Administration figures cited by Reuters. The agency said 113 production platforms, representing 30% of the Gulf total, were still evacuated.
Shell began returning personnel to several Gulf assets, and Chevron said it was redeploying crews and working toward full production. The timing of a complete restart remained uncertain.
The Energy Department authorized emergency exchanges of up to 4 million barrels of crude from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to address the disruption. The action came after producers had shut more than 70% of U.S. Gulf crude production at one point Friday.
The storm added another supply constraint to an oil market already reacting to Middle East shipping risks and changing trade flows. Brent settled Friday at $104.72 a barrel and West Texas Intermediate at $91.85, but Reuters identified several forces behind the day's moves, so the price change cannot be attributed to the hurricane alone.
