power outages

Winds from Hurricane Helene caused damage and power outages Thursday.Numbers are taken from Florida Power and Light's power tracker map and Lee County Electric Cooperative's outage map.

A power outage affected traffic lights along Alico Road and Ben Hill Griffin Parkway and businesses in Gulf Coast Town Center leading to at least one crash Sunday evening.

Fla. Gov. Ron DeSantis said the Lee County Electric Cooperative is moving too slowly restoring power to its customers in the hardest-hit communities in Southwest Florida after Hurricane Ian and needs to ask for more help in terms of mutual assistance.The governor said the LCEC needs to accept help from mutual aid groups in hard-hit areas like Cape Coral, North Fort Myers, Sanibel, and Pine Island. National agencies such as the Florida Electrical Cooperatives Association on Sunday morning said it remained ready with resources from its members around the state willing to come in and help.DeSantis’ reaction came after a briefing at the State Emergency Operations Center in Tallahassee on the efforts to restore power in Southwest Florida.DeSantis learned the Florida Power & Light said more than 45% of their accounts in Lee County were back on, but the LCEC reported power restored to just to 9% of their customers, which represents about 18,000 out of 183,000.

A little more than a day after Hurricane Ian made landfall, Florida Power & Light knew how many of its 2 million customers are without power, and where they are, but company officials can’t tell most of those whose power was still out more than 24 hours later when to expect the lights to turn back on.“Daylight revealed Hurricane Ian’s utter destruction, and our hearts go out to our fellow Floridians whose lives have been upended,” said Eric Silagy, FPL’s chairman and chief executive officer. “We know the vital role electricity plays. Rest assured, we will not stop until we can get the lights back on.”Hurricane Ian came ashore near Fort Myers as a Category 4 storm packing sustained winds of 150 mph on a trajectory that would prove devastating for many reasons: the strength of its winds, its slow forward speed, and its meandering path that meant the huge storm touched nearly every place in peninsular Florida.Power had been restored to much of Southeast Florida, which was hit by Ian’s feeder bands for 36 hours, which is where many of the 750,000 customers who had their service turned on in the first 24 hours lived.

The analysis uses data gathered from utility companies around the country and defines a major power outage as one impacting more than 50,000 customers. The criteria for a weather event vary from place to place. Climate Central finds that 58% of weather-related outages were caused by severe weather, such as high winds, rain, and thunderstorms. Another 22% is attributed to winter weather, 15% to hurricanes and tropical storms and a smaller number of outages could be attributed to extreme heat and wildfires.

It’s been more than a week since Hurricane Irma hit the state. Florida Power & Light is still working to restore electricity to people’s homes. In a…