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LOUIS HAU and DAVID KARPFrances had time to work over electric systems. But officials say restoration won't take as long as with Charley.
Nearly 380,000 Tampa Bay area customers were without electricity early this morning, and many face at least one more night without power.
While some power was restored between bands of wind and rain, utility companies had to pull most of their repair crews off the streets for much of Sunday because of Hurricane Frances.
Most utilities said Sunday night they did not expect weather conditions in the bay area to be safe enough to send out bucket trucks until after dawn today. They warned that fully restoring power could take days.
The protracted wait for Frances to pass through, the longest in recent years for local utilities, was due to the storm's unusually broad swath and slow speed.
"It's just creeping along like a monster in a B-movie," Tampa Electric Co. spokesman Ross Bannister said.
Late Sunday, Progress Energy Florida of St. Petersburg said about 495,100 of its approximately 1.5-million customers were without electricity, including 86,826 in Pinellas County, 34,108 in Pasco County and 34,398 in Citrus County.
Tampa Electric said about 193,000 of its approximately 620,000 customers had lost power, including 158,000 in Hillsborough County and 9,000 in Pasco County.
Withlacoochee River Electric Cooperative of Dade City said 46,400 of its approximately 180,000 customers had lost power, including about 30,000 in Hernando County, 10,000 in Citrus County and 5,000 in Pasco County.
Sumter Electric Cooperative of Sumterville was particularly hard hit, with more than 103,000 of its 134,460 customers without electricity, including 11,500 in Citrus County.
"When you have a storm moving this slowly, it has plenty of time to continuously work on every piece of your system until something gives," said Barry Bowman, director of public affairs for Sumter Electric.
Statewide, about 3.1-million customers had no electricity late Sunday. The bulk of them were customers of Florida Power & Light of Juno Beach, the state's largest electric company. FPL serves South Florida, most of the Atlantic Coast and the Gulf Coast up to Manatee County. About 1.8-million FPL customers were left without power.
Utilities said they won't be able to fully assess the damage they have sustained until later this week. Despite widespread outages, early evidence suggests the post-Frances restoration effort won't require quite as much reconstruction of the transmission infrastructure as after Hurricane Charley, according to Barry Moline, executive director of the Florida Municipal Electric Association, which represents 32 municipal utilities.
"There are outages, but they're fixable," Moline said.
FPL spokesman Bill Swank said his company has received fewer reports of broken transmission poles than it did after Hurricane Charley, which devastated FPL's infrastructure in Punta Gorda and Port Charlotte.
"This storm did not have the same power that Charley had when it came ashore," he said.
Still, Frances is creating major logistical headaches. In addition to keeping repair personnel from venturing out, Frances' size forced thousands of other linemen from out-of-state utilities and contractors to stay in Georgia, Swank said.
Power outages made some local roads treacherous for motorists Sunday.
In St. Petersburg, some streets were dark while others one block away had house lights burning. Street lights were out on the west side of Tropicana Field, while other intersections east of the parking lots worked.
Bursts of wind snapped traffic signals back and forth along Tampa's Kennedy Boulevard, which had little traffic at the height of the storm. Traffic signals along several blocks lost power.
Bay area residents tried to make the best of power delays.
Early Sunday afternoon, St. Petersburg resident Mike Shaker walked outside his Disston Heights home barechested in the gusty winds, surveying the damage.
An old tree, rotted inside its trunk, had fallen on a nearby power line early that morning, cutting off electricity to his block.
A woman standing in her backyard yelled at the 53-year-old Shaker.
"Should I call them again?" she said, referring to the power company.
"They can do nothing now," Shaker replied.
"I think we are going to be living by candle."
"Do you like romantic lighting?" he asked, smiling.
John Murphy, 46, of Seffner made preparations for an extended power outage, which he planned to wait out at home with his wife, Gerry, their two grown daughters, four cats and two dogs.
Along with ice and bottles of water, they stocked a large cooler with milk and a batch of banana pudding Murphy had whipped up.
"That's the important stuff," he said.
The loss of electricity also left some residents frustrated.
In the Beach Park neighborhood of Tampa, Tony Palermo, 71, was waiting for his house lights to come back on Sunday afternoon.
"How could they not put it back on?" Palermo asked, 90 minutes after he lost power.
"They should have put it back on," he said.
Palermo lives with his 88-year-old cousin, Linda Caggiano, who had no flashlights or batteries. The food in her refrigerator already was warming.
FPL's Swank said the delay has been difficult for utilities and their line crews.
"These guys like to work, they wanna get at it," Swank said. "This is as frustrating to them as it is to the people out of service."
Times staff writers Elizabeth Dyer and Michael Van Sickler contributed to this report.