Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
FPL relief rate up to 70 percent
All to be back by Sunday, FPL says
FPL says it is making good progress, and the end-of-Sunday date customers are being given is an outside target. Some customers remain frustrated, citing Irma’s relatively low winds. Story,
Many South Florida residents who logged onto Florida Power & Light’s “power tracker” — fplmaps.com/index.html — Thursday got the same estimate: 11:45 p.m. Sunday. That’s the time the company says they will have their electricity back.
Sunday evening is the “outer” time that FPL hopes to restore power to all tri-county residents who lost it during Hurricane Irma, FPL spokesman Bryan Garner said on Thursday. This part of the restoration process is the slowest because FPL’s crews have to go neighborhood by neighborhood, and sometimes, house by house.
More than 3 million, or 70 percent of, homes and businesses powered by FPL have seen their electricity restored since Hurricane Irma entered the state on Saturday.
But 1.4 million of FPL’s 4.4 million impacted customers were still without power Thursday morning, according to FPL. And many customers are wondering why, when Hurricane Irma’s winds in the tri-county region were closer to a Category 1 than the forecast of Category 4 or 5.
“This is not the Keys, not the west coast, not Houston,” said
Marc Jaro, 45, a Mission Bay resident in West Boca Raton, where three of seven villages don’t have power. Jaro said the area should not be out of power, “especially after all the money FPL spent on the grid.”
Elsewhere in the state, 28 percent of Duke Energy’s 1.8 million customers are without power; 13 percent of Tampa Electric’s 752,000 customers; 30 percent of Florida Cooperatives’ 1.15 million customers; and 14 percent of municipalities’ 1.45 million customers, as of noon Thursday, according to the Florida Division of Emergency Management.
Still, 668,550 homes and businesses in South Florida continue to suffer the heat without electricity to cool their homes and keep food fresh.
In Broward, 206,450 still didn’t have electricity midThursday. In Palm Beach County, 156,590 were without power. In Miami-Dade, 305,510 were without power, according to the Florida Division.
Some South Florida customers complain their power went on, briefly, and then went out again. Garner said that can happen during the restoration process; elements of the grid sometimes have to be de-energized to bring up a line back on.
Fueling frustration has been customers’ inability to get an estimate of when their power will return. FPL set up a mobile app for this purpose, but it failed as its communications system was overwhelmed during the hurricane. Customers who tried to report or get a restoration estimate on FPL.com or 800-4-OUTAGE instead received an automated message.
The utility said it has had 21,000 crews, including many from out of state, working around the clock to restore power to the more than 5 million who lost it last weekend or Monday.
Hurricane Irma’s fury uprooted trees and sent debris flying that knocked down power lines. Flooding also has been an issue in restoring power.
While residents without power suffered through South Florida’s 90-plus degree heat, others met with tragedy this week. Eight elderly residents of a Hollywood rehabilitation home died after the storm’s damage knocked out the air conditioning.
FPL said the rehabilitation center had only “partial power.” It was not deemed as a “top tier” priority in restoration in pre-hurricane planning with Broward County. An example of a top tier priority is Memorial Hospital, which was right across the street from the rehabilitation center.
FPL urged distressed residents with medical issues to call 911, not the utility, for help.
Garner said those critical infrastructure priorities are determined well before a storm, and that FPL was not altering its restoration plan to ensure more vulnerable populations were getting their power back first.
He did say FPL has restored power to 112 hospitals, and that 263 substations — the backbone of the electric grid — were restored.
The utility, which has invested $3 billion to upgrade its grid since 2006, said the Hurricane Irma’s winds and flooding were the first real test of its “hardened” system. FPL said power pole damage was “minimal, transmission structures held up well, and all substations were already operating again since the storm.
“For us to have all of our substations energized on Day 2 of restoration, that is extremely encouraging,” Gould said.
But Don Lipse, 68, who with his wife and dog have been without power since Saturday at his home in the Broken Sound community in Boca Raton, is not impressed. He said it’s always the same 10 homes in the community of nearly 300 that lose power in a storm. When he looks up his address on FPL’s website, the “power tracker” system says his home has power.
Lipse said he can see a broken wire on a new concrete pole installed near his house but has not been able to reach FPL about it.
“This is beyond belief,” he said.