Utilities prep for storm’s potent path
Hurricane Irma is poised to inflict the most widespread outages ever experienced by many of Florida’s utilities, and residents should be prepared to go days or weeks without power, utility officials say.
The storm is projected to cut power for 190,000 customers of Orlando Utilities Commission, or 80 percent of homes and businesses in the city, and more than 4 million customers of Florida Power & Light Co across the state, according to the calculations guiding the gathering of supplies and labor needed to restore power.
Duke Power anticipated more than 1 million customers will be without electricity. It’s the biggest power company in Central Florida with nearly 517,000 customers in Orange and Seminole counties alone and 1.8 million in a Florida service area that spreads to the Panhandle.
“Sounds like that kind of sucks,” said Linda Vallee, a resident of downtown Orlando, joining shoppers streaming into
Publix on Colonial Drive. “But we’ll just have to deal with it, pull together and be friends.”
OUC spokesman Tim Trudell said power losses in Orlando may last from a week to 10 days, which was similar to what happened after Hurricane Charley in 2004.
Charley cut off power in Central Florida for more than a third of 470,000 FPL customers, two-thirds of Duke’s 676,000 customers, nearly 80 percent of OUC’s 190,000 customers and all of Kissimmee Utility Authority’s 58,000 customers.
Commonly seen in the early days of Charley’s aftermath, before repairs crews could move in, were power lines tangled in fallen trees or snaking across streets and sidewalks, with lethal potential. “Treat any line like it’s a live, electric line,” Trudell said.
Trudell also urged customers to gather water supplies, including by using empty containers at home, as bottled water has been scarce in stores.
OUC maintained its water supply during Hurricane Charley; Trudell said that’s not a certainty with Irma.
FPL president and CEO Eric Silagy said his utility, the largest in the state, will not be faced with power restoration in many cases but with rebuilding sections of its grid.
He said concrete poles will snap and steel poles will bend; some power plants may be shut down.
“We have the strongest, most highly engineered, smartest grid in the United States, but there is no way to engineer against a storm of this kind of magnitude,” Silagy said.
“It would be the largest number of customers we’ve ever had without power,” Silagy said. “I think it would probably be unprecedented for any utility in the United States to have that many customers impacted by a single storm.”
Silagy added the outages may “stretch into weeks.”
He also said that it would be difficult to predict any difference in damage potential in Central and South Florida.
Said Duke Energy president Harry Sideris: “We want to thank all of our customers ahead of time for their patience.”
Duke spokeswoman Ann Marie Varga also urged preparation.
“We recommend that families create [or update] an emergency supply kit that should include everything an individual or family would need for at least two weeks.”
Utilities are marshaling armies of tree trimmers needed as soon as the storm passes to remove debris so that damaged lines can be repaired.
Varga said Duke is mobilizing about 7,000 line specialists, tree trimmers, damage experts and support personnel.
FPL is gathering nearly twice that many, OUC has nearly 1,000 on hand and Kissimmee Utility Authority will reinforce its 45 workers with 120 brought in from Indiana, Wisconsin, Minnesota and Texas.
But Silagy said many utilities along the East Coast are keeping their crews close to home, wary of Irma’s track.
Silage also said that FPL learned from Hurricane Sandy that damage can be much worse when energized equipment is flooded.
As a result, FPL proactively turned off some grid systems in St. Augustine before they were flooded by Hurricane Matthew last year.
“It probably saved three days in getting power back up,” Silagy said. “There is no wholesale, proactive plan to shut down the grid in advance of the storm. We will operate through the storm everything that we possibly can.”
At risk for OUC are its power plants in east Orange County and their 550-foot chimneys; one of them took a costly beating from Hurricane Charley.
But OUC has no plans to proactively turn off any power, Trudell said.