Six Floridians are dead from Hurricane Isaias and thousands remain in the dark, but Gov. Ron DeSantis wants you to know things could have been worse. That's cold comfort to the families burying their dead and the neighborhoods still waiting on power trucks.

The death toll climbed to six this week, DeSantis confirmed at a Tuesday press conference. The latest deaths: a woman killed when a tree crashed onto her Escambia County home, and a man found dead in his garage from carbon monoxide poisoning after running a generator improperly. The four previously confirmed deaths include another tree-fall victim during cleanup, a car accident at an intersection, and two people who died because the storm disrupted their medical treatment.

DeSantis framed the toll as evidence of success. "We're sad to hear that. At the same time, we've had some where there have been a lot more," he said, according to The Guardian. "I think that people did take precautions and I think the local officials did a good job of spreading the word." The New York Post reported DeSantis noted the deaths occurred "a little bit more post-storm" and were "attenuated from the storm" — bureaucratic language for people who died in the aftermath, not the wind.

Here's what that "good job" looks like on the ground: more than 400,000 Florida customers lost power when the Category 2 storm slammed the Gulf Coast near Destin on Friday night with 118 mph gusts. DeSantis said 95% have been restored. That leaves over 20,000 still blacked out as of Wednesday morning, primarily in Escambia and Santa Rosa counties, per PowerOutage.us data cited by the Post. The Guardian put the number at roughly 5,000 — a discrepancy nobody in the governor's office appears to have bothered clarifying.

In Escambia County alone, initial damage assessments peg recovery costs at approximately $64 million. Free supplies are being distributed at designated locations. The state is shifting from immediate response to debris removal, damage assessments, and aid distribution.

Two additional storm-related deaths were reported in Alabama, including one person killed when a tree fell on a Birmingham home.

Isaias was the first Atlantic hurricane of the 2026 season — unusually late, with the first hurricane not forming this late since October 1905, according to NOAA. It was also the first hurricane to make landfall in the continental U.S. in two years, since Milton struck western Florida in October 2024.

The government always tells you it did a good job after a storm. The body count tells a different story. Six people are dead. Some of them didn't die from wind or water — they died because the infrastructure they depended on couldn't hold up when it mattered. That's not a success. That's a failure worth counting.