Some still without power,
Eight days after Hurricane Irma knocked out power to Ilea Velez’s home in the Rolling Oaks neighborhood in Apopka, she heard from a neighbor Monday afternoon that the lights were back on.
It was good news after a hard week, she said. Her diabetic husband had to throw out his insulin when the refrigerator couldn’t keep it cold.
“We lost everything in our fridge,” said Velez, who was out of the house when the power came back. “It’s OK; we’re still alive.”
Less than 3 percent of homes and businesses in Florida were without power as of 9 p.m. Monday. That included 12,789 customers in Orange County, 9,622 in Seminole, 10,035 in Lake and 16,256 in Volusia.
Osceola County was completely restored, and Brevard reported 680 outages.
The number of Duke customers without power appeared to climb Sunday as the utility got more accurate numbers while it reactivated its outage tracking system, which went down after the storm.
“Our customers’ homes were dark, and so were we in a way, because we were operating without this system,” Duke spokeswoman Peveeta Persaud said.
Duke was using a manual system based on caller reports and field workers’ observations, Persaud said. That accounted for some of the outages, but not all of them. Line workers for the utility were trying to get all but a few isolated cases back on the grid by 11 p.m. today.
A Charter Communications spokesman said he did not have exact numbers for how many customers are without cable and internet service. But the outages occurred largely because of homes and service centers that don’t have electrical power, he said.
Unlike electric utilities, Spectrum does not have a publicly available map showing the location of outages and how long it may take to restore service.
Service should be back for most customers when the region is back to full power, spokesman Joe Durkin said.
“The power companies have been doing a phenomenal job working hard to restore service across the state,” Durkin said.
After a week without power, tensions were running high: On Saturday a Duke employee said a customer made a bomb threat to the utility’s Winter Garden location, Winter Garden Police Lt. Scott Allen said.
It turned out that the customer, who lives in Winter Park, did not make a direct threat, Allen said.
“There was no actual bomb threat. It was just a misunderstanding between the caller and employee,” he said.
Still, security guards and a police officer swept the Duke building and did not find any explosives. Police spoke with the customer, who later posted an irate message on Twitter, Allen said.
“Y’all can figure out how to send police to my house but can’t even send anyone to look at our issues,” the message said, according to Allen.