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LOUIS HAUTampa Electric Co. said it hopes to finish restoring electricity to its Hillsborough customers by Sunday.
TAMPA - Freed from the final spasms of Hurricane Frances, Tampa Electric Co. restored power to more than 130,000 customers Tuesday, as nerves frayed among many other customers forced to sweat out another day.
By the end of the day, 41,000 customers were still without power in Hillsborough, down from 179,000 on Monday.
Tampa Electric said it hopes to finish restoring electricity in Hillsborough and Pasco counties sometime between Friday and Sunday, a far more optimistic forecast than the day before, when it warned some customers might not have power for two weeks.
Some areas were worse off than others. Trouble spots around Tampa included Davis Islands; the Drew Park area east of Tampa International Airport; east Tampa around Sligh Avenue and 56th Street and the area around Busch Boulevard and 46th Street.
Fallen trees and large branches were a major culprit, pulling down power lines, utility poles and transformers in tangled heaps that often required tree-trimming crews to cut through the mess with chain saws, according to Tampa Electric spokesman Ross Bannister.
Line crews occasionally faced other obstacles, such as flooding, which prevented them from beginning repairs on Davis Islands until Tuesday morning, Bannister said. While the company could rely on backup support from other utilities and contractors, hundreds of other out-of-state line crews didn't arrive until Tuesday, held up by hazardous road conditions.
For the thousands of Tampa residents still wilting in the early September heat without electricity, patience was running thin.
Peter and Donna Schneider, who live in South Tampa off Bayshore Boulevard, have been without power since Saturday. Tuesday afternoon, Mrs. Schneider, 42, sat on a swing on the front porch trying to keep her 4-month-old son, Eric, cool. The baby was stripped to the diapers.
Mr. Schneider, 53, said he has called Tampa Electric repeatedly to report that the storm blew branches onto a power line that runs over his front yard, and he is worried the line will collapse.
After enduring multiple recordings on the Tampa Electric line, "I've given up on them," he said. "It's pitiful. What can you do? How much can you complain? You get a recording. There's no customer service. There's no response."
Some residents were questioning why certain customers had their power restored by Tuesday night and others hadn't.
Jan Naffziger wanted to know what took so long for her mother and other elderly residents of Bayshore Presbyterian Apartments to get their power back. Retirees were forced to climb as much as 15 floors by stairway for three days until power started returning Tuesday night while fancy homes down the road had the electric restored in hours.
"They don't consider the elderly in retirement homes to be a priority at all," she said.
Eric and Barbara Mader lost power in their Palma Ceia home Monday and have been staying with a friend. They feared their 2-week-old daughter, Elle, would get too hot without air conditioning.
"With a newborn, it's very frustrating," said Mrs. Mader, 34. "We haven't heard anything as far as when (power) is going to be turned back on. I've called every day and I get the recording. It'd be nice to know when we can go home."
Local utilities acknowledged that outages and subsequent power restorations can seem random. One street might have power, the next one over might not. An entire apartment complex can be in the dark, while another three blocks away is ablaze in lights.
But they said that is because that electricity service depends on many variables. A downed distribution line can cut the lights to thousands of customers. A blown transformer could affect just a few homes on one side of a street. A broken wire connecting a home to nearby power line will cut out electricity to that home only.
As for prioritizing their restoration work, utilities insist the only ranking they do, other than restoring power first to hospitals and other emergency services, is to focus initially on making repairs that benefit the largest number of customers in the shortest period of time.
Tampa Electric's Bannister pointed out that customers still without power Tuesday included the company's president, Bill Cantrell, a resident of South Tampa, and North Tampa resident Gordon Gillette, chief financial officer and executive vice president of parent TECO Energy Inc.
"We recognize the longer it goes, the more our customers' patience is strained," Bannister said. "We certainly appreciate their cooperation."
Times staff writers Saundra Amrhein, Christopher Goffard and Amy Wimmer Schwarb contributed to this report.