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LOUIS HAUProgress Energy is trying to get electricity back to those hardest hit by Charley, but the work ahead will be arduous.
LAKE WALES - Virginia Stewart was relaxing Tuesday afternoon in her small, screened-in porch, sipping ice water from a paper cup.
Despite her serene demeanor, what the 73-year-old looked out on was the tangled mess that her neighborhood has become.
Massive oak limbs are strewn across yards, dead power lines snake across the grass and sidewalks. Broken utility poles and ceramic insulators litter the ground.
"I've been living in Florida all my life, so you're used to some kinds of storms," she said. "But not these kinds."
The scene around Stewart illustrates the challenge still ahead for Florida utilities trying to recover from Hurricane Charley. Away from the coastline of ground zero in Charlotte County are countless neighborhoods like this one in which a multitude of toppled trees and utility posts will make restoring power an arduous task.
Stewart and most other residents in this small Polk County town have been without power since Friday. Their electric company, Progress Energy Florida of St. Petersburg, says it may not get the lights back on before Sunday.
Progress dodged a bullet when Hurricane Charley veered to the east before reaching Pinellas County, the company's most densely populated market. A direct hit to its home base would have devastated the utility's energy delivery infrastructure in the Tampa Bay area and possibly some of the power plants that generate its electricity.
But while the storm damage to Progress' service territory wasn't as staggering as it could have been, the company still faces a gigantic cleanup job in Central Florida.
In addition to knocking out power to tens of thousands of customers, Charley severely damaged more than 700 of the utility's 4,100 miles of transmission lines. Those lines deliver electricity from the utility's power plants to substations, which then send electricity through the lower-voltage distribution lines that carry power to local neighborhoods.
The diminished transmission capacity won't affect Progress customers in Pinellas, Pasco, Hernando and Citrus counties because they are served by local power plants in the Tampa Bay area, said Alan Sowell, a Progress Florida executive who is coordinating the utility's storm recovery efforts.
But Tampa Bay area customers may still have to foot a portion of the bill for the recovery effort, depending on the ultimate cost.
Progress has about $40.9-million in its storm reserve fund. If its recovery costs exceed that amount, the utility can ask the Florida Public Service Commission for permission to assess a surcharge on customer bills to make up the difference. The company said Tuesday that it's too early to estimate a cost.
Tampa Electric Co., which experienced far fewer failures in its service territory, projects its storm recovery costs to total about $9-million to $11-million, most of which it expects to pay for with money from its reserve fund of about $40-million, according to Sherrill Hudson, chairman and chief executive of Tampa Electric parent TECO Energy Inc.
Meanwhile, Progress line crews have been working feverishly since early Saturday morning to replace or repair fallen utility poles, downed power lines and damaged transformers and substations.
Late Tuesday afternoon, Progress had 168,672 customers without electricity, down from a peak of 502,000 at midnight Friday.
Restoring power completely is going to take a little longer: by the end of the day Friday for Progress customers in Seminole and Volusia counties, by Saturday for those in Orange County, by Sunday for Polk and Highlands counties and by Tuesday for Hardee County. (Some towns will be fully restored sooner.)
Other utilities were also making headway in restoring power to their customers. Late Tuesday afternoon, Tampa Electric Co. had fewer than 1,400 customers without electricity, nearly all of them in Polk County and down from a peak of 78,000.
Florida Power & Light of Juno Beach, the state's largest electric utility, said about 214,000 of its customers were without power Tuesday afternoon, down from a peak of about 874,000.
Now comes the long, hard slog of restoring power to particularly hard-hit areas such as the Orange County town of Maitland. In this quiet Orlando suburb, the usual mid-August soundtrack of buzzing cicadas has to share air time this week with a buzzing of different sort: chain saws and portable generators.
Portions of the canopy of tall oak trees that lends Maitland its charm were ripped apart, pulling down countless power lines as they fell. Some of those power lines ended up draped over the back yard of Debbie Tomlinson's home in the Dommerich Estates housing development. Several other wires hang low enough to block entry to her street.
"We're thankful our house was okay,;; the 42-year-old homemaker and part-time preschool teacher said Monday. But without electricity, "normal life feels more difficult - we're trying to be patient."
The damage was perhaps even more severe in Lake Wales, a town of about 11,600 in eastern Polk County. Transmission lines were torn off the towering utility poles along State Road 60, while jagged, wooden stumps are all that remain of poles elsewhere in town.
The tin and aluminum roof of the Wausau Homes manufacturing facility on North Scenic Highway sits next to the building in large, mangled heaps. Even the 120-bed Lake Wales Medical Center, one of the few places in town to have electricity, didn't have power restored until Monday night.
Large companies haven't been immune to power outages. Florida's Natural Growers, the orange juice company, has its corporate headquarters and a manufacturing facility in Lake Wales on U.S. 27. The company halted production Thursday and relied on generators to keep its refrigeration units operating until it had power restored Tuesday afternoon.
Charles Matthews, vice president of operations for Florida's Natural, commended Progress for its restoration efforts. "Certainly, as with everyone else, we'd have loved to have power sooner, but for them to have gotten the power on as soon as they have, we're certainly appreciative of what they've done."