As electricity creeps back across the Florida Panhandle and southern Alabama after Hurricane Isaias, thousands of households now face a second, quieter loss — the groceries that sat in warm refrigerators for a day or more. About 226,000 customers were still without power Sunday evening in the two areas, according to an Associated Press report citing outage tracker data, two days after the storm came ashore near Destin as a Category 2 hurricane.
The federal rule is short. A closed refrigerator keeps food safe for up to 4 hours without power, and a full freezer holds a safe temperature for about 48 hours, or 24 hours if half full, according to FoodSafety.gov's power outage charts. For many homes in Escambia, Santa Rosa and Okaloosa counties, and in Alabama communities from Mobile to Birmingham, those windows closed long ago.
