The scene in Titusville. (Getty)
Thousands in Florida are already without power as Hurricane Matthew approaches the Sunshine State. Florida Power & Light Company is reporting power outages in counties all along the coast. Over 400,000 FPL customers have lost power at some point during the storm. State officials said that 826,920 Floridians are without power.
FPL has activated its emergency plan for every single county along the Florida Atlantic coast, from Nassau to Miami-Dade, as well as southwest counties and other northeast counties. Click here for the FPL map. To find out if counties near you have lost power, click here to go to the FPL website.
FPL anticipates as many as 2.5 million customers will experience outages during the storm.
“Depending upon Matthew’s ultimate path and intensity, damage to our electrical infrastructure will be extensive,” Eric Silagy, president and CEO of FPL, said in a statement. “The impacts of this storm will far exceed the design standards of not just the FPL system, but much of the design standards of homes and buildings throughout the region. Some areas of our service territory may experience extended and repeated outages, while others may require a total rebuild of our energy infrastructure. The most important thing now is to ensure our customers have completed their final storm preparations and are ready to ride out this storm safely.”
Here is the list of customers experiencing power outages across Florida, via FLGov.com.
- Alachua – 3,216 customers, 2% outage
- Baker – 264, 2% outage
- Bradford – 174 customers, 2% outage
- Brevard County – 186,999, 61% outage
- Broward – 5,070 customers, 1% outage
- Clay – 7,485 customers, 5% outage
- Duval – 4,743 customers, 1% outage
- Flagler County – 39,261 customers, 69% outage
- Franklin County – 103 customers, 1% outage
- Hamilton – 90 customers, 1% outage
- Highlands – 472 customers, 1%
- Indian River County – 59,244 customers, 67% outage
- Jefferson County – 64 customers, 1% outage
- Lake County – 14,009 customers, 8% outage
- Marion County – 4,783 customers, 3 % outage
- Martin County – 44,600 customers, 48% outage
- Okeechobee County – 1,270 customers, 6% outage
- Orange County – 49,326 customers, 9% outage
- Osceola County – 6,172 customers, 5% outage
- Palm Beach County – 43,160 customers, 6% outage
- Putnam County – 8,160 customers, 20% outage
- Seminole County – 40,787 customers, 20% outage
- Johns County – 28,950 customers, 33% outage
- Lucie County – 51,312 customers, 34% outage
- Volusia County – 218,308 customers, 78% outage
As The Sun Sentinel notes, 2.5 million customers lost power during 2005’s Hurricane Wilma and it took FPL 18 days to restore power. However, the following year, the company began a $2 billion effort to upgrade the electric grid and they expect to restore power quicker this time. FPL spokesman Robert Gould also warns people not to walk through flooded areas because there could be dangerous downed power lines.
To report a downed power line, you can call FPL at 800-468-8243 or visit FPL.com/outage.
Duke Energy and OUC are also reporting outages in Central Florida.
Click here to see if your county is under an evacuation order: