When will power return after Hurricane Ian? FPL CEO gives Florida timeline for repairs
Florida’s largest power provider said Saturday that thousands of customers impacted by Hurricane Ian were expected to have their electricity return in early October.
Most Florida Power & Light customers can expect electricity to return by Sunday, Oct. 9 or sooner, said FPL CEO Eric Silagy during a press conference from the company’s command center in West Palm Beach.
He said 600,000 customers remain without power. Most connections can be repaired, Silagy said, but the company has to rebuild in areas along the southwest of Florida that experienced the most damage from Ian, which will take weeks or months.
Power is back for all of South Florida as of Saturday, including in Monroe, Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach counties.
“We have made great progress today. We are not really rebuilding our system as much as we thought we were going to. We are repairing in most places outside of the barrier islands and the beaches and the immediate coastline of southwest Florida,” Silagy said. “In those area we are going to be rebuilding.”
Flagler, Seminole, Volusia and most of Manatee counties will regain power by late Tuesday. Charlotte, Hendry, Lee, Highlands and a tiny pocket of Manatee bordering Sarasota will be reconnected by Sunday, Oct. 9, according to FPL.
The state has a total of 1.06 million outages as of Saturday evening, according to PowerOutage.us, a website that compiles outage numbers. Power has been restored to thousands since the storm made landfall in Charlotte’s Punta Gorda and after the number of power outages peaked at 2.6 million.
The hardest-hit areas now include the inland county of Hardee, home to the city of Wauchula, with nearly 73% of roughly 16,000 residential and commercial buildings still out of power, according to PowerOutage.us.
Florida’s top emergency manager predicted supply chain shortages could slow power providers repair and rebuild efforts during hurricane season in 2022. Silagy said FPL fully stocked up on enough materials for a Category 4 storm ahead of hurricane season.
Hurricane Ian brought destructive flooding over Southwest Florida, including to Fort Myers, Sanibel and Naples.
This story was originally published October 1, 2022 at 12:03 PM.
