Nearly 54,000 homes and businesses in Florida’s western Panhandle were still without electricity Tuesday afternoon, four days after Hurricane Isaias made landfall as a Category 2 storm. Emergency crews were also clearing debris and working on smaller roads in residential areas. The outages were concentrated in Escambia County, where 23,380 customers lacked power, and Santa Rosa County, where 24,240 were still without service. About 450,000 residences and businesses lost electricity after the storm, and roughly 16,000 linemen have worked to restore service. Gov. Ron DeSantis said Tuesday that utilities expected to reconnect all customers in areas where it was safe to restore power by the end of the day. Some locations in hard-hit Santa Rosa County could not yet safely receive electricity, he said, and remaining outages after the day’s work would depend on needed repairs. Isaias has been linked to six deaths in Florida, DeSantis said. Two were directly caused by the storm, while four occurred during its aftermath, including a car crash, a death associated with improper generator use and two deaths related to interruptions in medical treatment. At a news conference in Vernon, DeSantis also announced $27 million in grants for rural communities, including areas affected by the storm. Awards include $3 million for wastewater transmission lines in Gulf County, $2 million for an access road in Jackson County, and funding for a primary care clinic and airport hangar in Calhoun County. Washington County is slated to receive $2.6 million, including $300,000 for a study of a proposed sports and entertainment complex. The continuing outages underscore the recovery challenges facing Panhandle communities, where damaged infrastructure and debris have left some residents waiting for basic services even as crews work to restore the grid.