MIAMI — Hurricane Ian left millions of Floridians without power Thursday morning, and they could be left in the dark for days.
Nearly a quarter of all Floridians sit without power Thursday morning, according to PowerOutage.us, a website that compiles outage numbers. The website recorded 2.61 million customers without electricity out of about 11 million customers in total. Power outage repairs could take days as service companies assess and work on the damage.
Lee County — the area that took the worst hit with Ian’s landfall — has 89% of all electricity users without power as of 10:24 a.m. local time.
Ian made landfall on 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.
Thousands are without power in South Florida, according to data from PowerOutage.us. Monroe had the fewest outages Thursday morning with 388 customers out of 99,765 without power. In Miami-Dade, 5,160 customers are out of power from about 1.2 million customers, Broward has 2,792 outages out of 963,625, and Palm Beach has 11,280 out of 766,020.
Florida Power & Light President and CEO Eric Silagy on Wednesday had said the company expects it will have to completely rebuild sections of its electrical system given Ian’s massive size and powerful winds, as well as the extensive rainfall and flooding.
“There are sections of our territory we will not be able to repair, we will have to rebuild,” Silagy said. “I can’t stress the difference that makes. Rebuilding can take many days or weeks.”
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(Miami Herald reporter Andres Viglucci contributed to this report.)
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