Which Florida counties are still without power after Hurricane Milton? Take a look
Hurricane Milton brought widespread power outages to Florida. At the peak, 3.4 million customers statewide were without power. By Saturday afternoon, there were still 1,500,00 million without power, according to the statistics firm Find Energy.
Hillsborough, Pinellas and Manatee counties currently have the most customers without power, according to data collected by Find Energy from all but eight utility companies that service Florida. Pinellas, Hillsborough and Manatee counties are also seeing the highest percentage of customers without power.
Gov. Ron DeSantis said earlier this week that more power outages were expected than the state experienced with Hurricane Helene. DeSantis said at a news conference in Tallahassee Thursday that there were more than 50,000 linemen ready to help with power restorations.
“A lot of what they will do this morning is likely to assess the damage and then begin restoration operations very quickly,” DeSantis said.
Duke Energy, which services over 2 million customers across the state and is the main provider in Pinellas County, announced in a press release Tuesday that it was convening 16,000 power line technicians, vegetation workers, damage assessors and support personnel at staging sites outside of Milton’s path but as close to the impacted areas as possible so they could help affected customers as soon as safe to do so.
READ MORE: Hurricane Milton makes landfall near Sarasota
Florida Power and Light also had 17,000 workers from over 40 states stationed to assist with restoration.
FPL President and CEO Armando Pimentel said Thursday that restoration would be “challenging” but that linemen would be working 24 hours a day. About 700,000 FPL customers have already had their power restored.
“We will not stop until all of our customers have restored their power,” Pimentel said. “We want to make sure everyone gets their life back to normal.”
By Friday morning, 1.25 million FPL customers had had their power restored, according to FPL’s power outage tracker.
FPL customers should expect to have an estimate of when their power will be restored sometime Friday, Pimentel said Thursday.
READ MORE: What you can do if Hurricane Milton cuts power, internet on Gulf Coast and South Florida
If you lost power, the utility companies recommend disconnecting or turning off any nonessential electrical equipment that could start automatically when power is restored to avoid overloading circuits.
If there is damage to your home from flooding or debris, Pimentel said it is important to contact a licensed electrician before restoring power.
This story and graphics will be updated periodically over the next few days as outage information changes. For updated information, head to findenergy.com/fl/power-outage/.
Miami Herald staff writer Ana Ceballos contributed to this story.
This story was originally published October 9, 2024 at 6:32 PM.
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