Repair crews from Florida electric utilities and out-of-state companies fanned out early Saturday to begin the task of restoring power to more than 1-million customers who were blacked out by Hurricane Charley.
Utility poles and power lines snapped or toppled along the path of the storm from Charlotte, Lee and Collier counties in the southwest up through Volusia County on the Atlantic coast. The loss of poles will significantly lengthen the time it takes to restore service to all customers, as some areas will require "complete system rebuilds."
Hospitals, police and fire departments and other essential services have been the first to get the attention. Line crews then will focus on repairing sections of local electric grids that can restore power to the greatest number of people at once.
Florida Power & Light of Juno Beach, the state's largest electric company with a service territory encompassing nearly all of south Florida and most of the Atlantic coast, suffered the most power outages. About 874,000 FPL customers lost electricity because of Charley and the early storm bands that preceded the hurricane.
Saturday, FPL was still assessing the extent of the damage to its service territory and wasn't yet certain when it would fully restore power to all of its customers, according to spokesman Tim Pagel.
But early inspections have shown that the devastation to FPL's electric infrastructure is reminiscent in some areas of the damage wrought by Hurricane Andrew in 1992, Pagel said.
While the Tampa Bay area was almost wholly spared the loss of power, Progress Energy Florida and Tampa Electric Co. still had to contend with tens of thousands of outages on the eastern edges of their service territories.
The task at hand was far more daunting for Progress Energy, which saw outages peak midnight Friday at 502,000 customers. By late Saturday, the St. Petersburg-based utility had lowered that figure to about 466,000.
Progress Energy counted the most outages in the Orange County suburbs of Orlando. But the damage to lines and poles was most severe in more sparsely populated Polk, Hardee and Highlands counties, where its line crews will have to perform a number of "complete system rebuilds" to replace obliterated poles, wires, transformers and other equipment, according to Progress Energy spokesman Keith Poston.
Poston said Charley also damaged generating units at the utility's Hines Energy Complex in Polk County and its Tiger Bay power plant in Fort Meade. Both were shut down Friday night for repairs.
Meanwhile, Tampa Electric said it had about 46,000 customers without electricity late Saturday, down from 78,000 the night before. Nearly all of the remainder were located in Winter Haven, where the damage was so extensive the Tampa utility warned it does not expect to finish restoring power to all households until Friday.
Even as the two utilities worked to get the lights back on for some customers in Central Florida, they also experienced momentary setbacks as other storms rolled through the area overnight Friday and Saturday and triggered more outages, knocking over trees and utility poles that had been weakened by Charley.
To pay for these repairs, Florida investor-owned utilities are permitted by the Public Service Commission to dip into storm reserve funds they are allowed to accumulate through their monthly rates. FPL has the largest reserve fund at $340-million, while Progress Energy has a $40.9-million reserve fund and Tampa Electric, a unit of TECO Energy Inc. of Tampa, has $40-million in reserves.
TECO chairman and chief executive Sherrill Hudson said Saturday the utility doesn't expect to use more than a portion of its storm reserve fund for the post-Charley clean-up. Representatives for FPL and Progress Energy said it was too early to tell whether their reserve funds would cover their recovery costs.
Although FPL, Progress Energy and Tampa Electric account for the bulk of electric customers affected by Charley, other customers are served by smaller, municipally owned utilities. Orlando Utilities Commission, which serves the city of Orlando and nearby St. Cloud, reported 149,000 outages Saturday. Outage figures for other affected municipal utilities weren't immediately available.
Despite the damage caused by Charley, the consequences for Progress Energy and Tampa Electric could have been far worse if the hurricane had made landfall in the Tampa Bay area. Indeed, Tampa Electric said Saturday it would need only about 1,000 of the 3,200 out-of-state utility workers it had requested and redirected them to assist in its recovery efforts.
At a Saturday morning press conference, TECO's Hudson said the weather reports the utility consulted as the storm approached expected Charley to become a Category 5 storm if it had stayed its projected course into Tampa Bay.
"The impact here would have been way more devastating than what has happened, as bad as it is south of us," Hudson said.
Louis Hau can be reached at hau@sptimes.com or 813 226-3404.
