Florida Power & Light have activated its emergency response plan Thursday as Hurricane Dorian continued to gain strength on its possible path to Florida. The storm is now expected to hit the east coast of Florida early Monday morning, potentially as a powerful Category 4.
FPL has 5,000 workers on standby and has been compiling and pre-staging equipment, including miles of power lines and replacement transformers, around the state.
Given the storm’s uncertain path, FPL announced it is on standby throughout the state and is holding preparedness meetings and setting up staging sites across the state. FPL has also notified its partner utility companies elsewhere in the country to prepare to help respond in Florida, she said.
Dorian’s approach to Florida comes nearly two years after the Sept. 10 Hurricane Irma landing at Cudjoe Key as a Category 4 storm. The storm, which had maximum sustained winds of 130 mph during that landfall, quickly weakened to a Category 3 and moved north through the middle of the state.
According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the storm led to outages for 6.7 million electricity customers, about 64 percent of Florida power company accounts. Hundreds of thousands of Southwest Florida residents lost power to the storm, which also caused more than $1 billion in damage to the region.
FPL says it’s too early to predict how many Florida customers might see outages.
Lee County Electric Cooperative, which serves 200,000 customers in Lee County and parts of Broward, Collier, Charlotte and Hendry counties, has made arrangements with outside vendors to have extra equipment and workers at the ready should Dorian cause significant outages in the region, said spokeswoman Karen Ryan.
Ryan said LCEC has made arrangements with 100 out-of-town crews — including line workers and tree trimmers — to provide support services in Southwest Florida.
About 170,000 of the company’s customers lost power during Irma. Some living in rural areas and in areas like Lehigh Acres did not get power back for weeks.
“If we are impacted and there are outages, we just ask customers to be patient,” Ryan said. “We know the power’s out. They don’t have to call us right away and tell us. Just be patient.”
You can find LCEC’s hurricane guide here.