By LOUIS HAU and SHANNON COLAVECCHIO-VAN SICKLER
Published August 14, 2004
Like armies preparing for an epic battle, Progress Energy Florida and Tampa Electric Co. had amassed their troops and called in reinforcements to face down the devastating force of Hurricane Charley.
But while Charley left tens of thousands of their customers without electricity late Friday, only a relative handful were in Hillsborough County, with Pinellas, Pasco, Hernando and Citrus counties spared significant disruptions in service.
The two utilities now face a power-restoration effort that will be far short of the monumental cleanup they had anticipated.
"We were expecting much greater damage," Tampa Electric spokesman Ross Bannister said. "Certainly there is relief in our service territory that the damage wasn't as significant as we were planning for."
With weather forecasts as late as Friday morning projecting Charley would slam head-on into the Tampa Bay area, Progress and Tampa Electric had warned of widespread and protracted power outages due to downed power lines and severe flooding.
Progress had shut down one Pinellas County power plant Thursday and another two Friday morning to protect against damage from rising water. The St. Petersburg utility also cut power Friday morning to Pinellas beach towns extending from St. Pete Beach to Clearwater Beach.
Meanwhile, Tampa Electric warned Friday that some homes and businesses might be without power for weeks if Charley wreaked havoc on the utility's transmission lines and energy circuits. The company said it might have to cut off power pre-emptively to the downtown Tampa business district, Harbour Island and Davis Islands, all low-lying areas vulnerable to seawater intrusion.
To augment their own linemen and other support personnel, Progress and Tampa Electric each requested the aid of more than 3,000 personnel from mostly out-of-state utilities.
But in the end, the disruptions were minimal to Tampa Bay area customers. Tampa Electric cut power to four buildings in the lowest-lying areas of downtown Tampa, including the Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center and an Ashley Drive office building that houses the Tampa bureau of the St. Petersburg Times. But the utility said Friday that it expects to restore power to those facilities today.
As of late Friday, about 75,000 of the Tampa utility's 620,000 customers were without power. But the overwhelming majority were located in Polk County, with only a few thousand in eastern Hillsborough, mostly around Plant City, Bannister said.
The storm damage absorbed by Progress was also mostly restricted to counties east of the Tampa Bay area, including Polk, Orange, Highlands and Lake counties where about 477,000 were without electricity late Friday.
The three Pinellas power plants that had been shut down were put back on line Friday afternoon, after which power was restored to the Pinellas beach towns.
Pinellas County, which accounts for about a third of the utility's approximately 1.5-million customers in Florida, did not have a significant number of outages as of late Friday.
"The good fortune for (Pinellas) was the misfortune of those south of here and east of here," said Progress spokesman Will Edgar.
