Irma knocks out power to nearly 4 million homes in Florida

• 6 years ago (2017-09-11)
• David Flin

North America 996 Transmission 181

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Hurricane Irma knocked out power to nearly 4 million homes and businesses in Florida on Sunday, threatening millions more as it moved up the state’s west coast. Local electric utilities said that full restoration of service could take weeks. So far, the storm has mainly affected Florida Power and Light’s customers in the south and east of the state. Its own operations have also been affected.

Rob Gould, spokesman for FPL, said: “We are not subject to any special treatment from Hurricane Irma. We experienced a power outage at our command centre. We do have backup generation.”

FPL, the biggest power company in Florida, said that between 3 and 4 million of its customers were without power by 10pm on Sunday, mostly in Miami-Dade, Broward, and Palm Beach counties. Around 200,000 have had electricity restored, mostly by automated devices.

Gould said that the company’s transmission network will need to be rebuilt, particularly in the western part of the state. He said: “That restoration process will be measured in weeks, not days.”

Large utilities serving other parts of the state, including units of Duke Energy, Southern, and Emera, were seeing their outage figures grow as the storm moved north.

Duke’s outages increased from 60,000 to 390,000 over a four hour period on Sunday evening, and the company warned its 1.8 million customers in northern and central Florida that outages could ultimately exceed 1 million. The company warned customers that outages may last a week or longer.

Emera’s Tampa Electric utility said that the storm could affect up to 500,000 of the 730,000 homes and businesses it serves, and that over 180,000 had already lost power.

Thousands of workers, some from as far away as California, have been deployed to help the utilities restore power once Irma’s high winds have passed. About 17,000 are helping FPL, nearly 8000 at Duke, and over 1300 at Emera.