MIAMI — Florida Power & Light reported more than 1.2 million of its customers have no electricity because of Hurricane Ian. Some users are regaining power, but many others will be left without electricity for days.
Florida’s largest power company faced many outages across the state as of Thursday afternoon due to flooding and wind damage, FPL Communication Director Bryan Garner said.
Garner provided an update from the FPL Command Center in Riviera Beach. He said those in areas without “catastrophic damage” can expect power to return “very quickly.”
Others will have to wait days, especially those in areas hardest hit by Ian. FPL warned Wednesday that some energy grids would have to be rebuilt.
Ian made landfall Wednesday afternoon near Punta Gorda with 150 mph winds after leaving the entire island of Cuba without power earlier in the week. The storm brought “catastrophic flooding” over east-central Florida, including to Fort Myers, Sanibel and Naples. The Category 4 storm later downgraded to a Category 1 during Wednesday night before weakening to a tropical storm Thursday morning.
“Hurricane Ian was one of the most powerful storms ever to make landfall in the United States,” Garner said. “Today is one of the first opportunities we’ve had in daylight to see some of the wreckage that Hurricane Ian left behind.”
FPL sent workers to areas where the wind dipped below 30 mph. It has more than 24,000 dispatchers across the state. Over 500,000 customers got power back either from dispatchers or through automated switches between Wednesday and Thursday.
Florida Power & Light President and CEO Eric Silagy spoke in a brief outdoor press conference Thursday on the Collier Fairgrounds before experiencing technical difficulties. “It’s still windy. It’s one of the challenges today, we will work 24 hours a day, seven days a week until the last power is restored,” he said.
In addition to accessibility to power lines, another concern for power companies, experts say, is supply chain shortages. Companies typically lack enough transformers and other supplies needed to restore power and some materials can take months to order and arrive.
Millions of Floridians were without power, according to PowerOutage.us, a website that compiles outage numbers. The website recorded 2.62 million customers without electricity out of about 11 million customers in total as of Thursday afternoon.
Lee County — the area that took the worst hit with Ian’s landfall — has 89% of all electricity users without power as of 3:13 p.m. Eastern time.
Thousands are without power in South Florida, according to data from PowerOutage.us. Monroe had the fewest outages Thursday afternoon with 73 customers out of 99,765 without power. In Miami-Dade, 5,950 customers are out of power from about 1.2 million customers, Broward has 1,572 outages out of 963,625, and Palm Beach has 8,110 out of 766,020.
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