Power restored 10 days after Hurricane Irma

Limited work left in hardest-hit areas, FPL says

Florida Power & Light Co. said Friday that it has restored power to nearly 4.5 million customer accounts or about 9 million people who were affected by Hurricane Irma.

The lights, refrigerators and air conditioning were fully back on 10 days after Hurricane Irma entered the state on Sept. 12. the company said.

In South Florida, FPL “essentially” completed restoration on Sept. 20, but that was three days later than the utility’s stated goal to restore power by Sept. 17 to the tricounty region. Crews started work in South Florida first as Irma traveled north through the state and onto the west coast.

Nearly 2.5 million homes and businesses, or 90 percent of FPL customers, in Palm Beach, Broward and Miami-Dade counties lost power during or after Irma.

Residents who remained without power were irate, especially since South Florida had mostly tropicalstorm winds with hurricane-wind gusts — not the major storm that forecasters expected. Public officials this week said they expected better after FPL spent nearly $3 billion in customer bill surcharges on upgrading the grid.

FPL said the dates were only “estimates,” and blamed the massive outages on overgrown vegetation. The utility said its upgraded electric grid had been fortified since 2006 with $3 billion in new concrete and steel poles, flood-mitigation equipment and smart sensors to identify outages worked well. But the company acknowledged that its system could not fully stay online when Irma’s winds uprooted trees and sent debris flying into power lines while heavy rains flooded some areas.

The Juno Beach-based electric utility said that restoration crews from across the country and Canada have begun returning home. FPL said it still has “limited work left to clean up in the hardest-hit areas.”

FPL president CEO Eric Silagy thanked customers for their patience. He said Irma’s “fierce winds, strong storm surge and flooding knocked out power to … the largest ever [restoration] in our history.”