Thousands Of Duke Energy Customers Without Power In Pinellas Co.

WUSF | By Mark Schreiner

Published January 7, 2020 at 3:00 PM EST

Duke Energy power outage map around 1145 a.m. Tuesday showed around 24,000 customers were without power. Courtesy Duke Energy

Duke Energy is saying the more than 34,000 Pinellas County customers affected by a power outage late Tuesday morning are now back in service.

According to the company’s , the area affected stretches from the St. Pete-Clearwater International Airport to the Historic Old Northeast neighborhood.

Duke Energy spokeswoman Ana Gibbs said, at about 10 a.m., the utility experienced problems with three of its substations near the airport. Gibbs added that they're still trying to determine what the exact cause was.

All three substations were restored by 11:40 a.m., which returned power to all the affected customers.

WUSF’s Steve Newborn is attending the Tampa Bay Regional Resiliency Coalition’s Leadership Summit at the Hilton at Carillon Park. He reported regular power was out for about 40 minutes, but the conference continued during the outage with emergency lights and speakers not using microphones.