{"id":44377,"date":"2019-08-30T09:44:35","date_gmt":"2019-08-30T13:44:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/?p=44377"},"modified":"2019-08-30T09:44:56","modified_gmt":"2019-08-30T13:44:56","slug":"fpl-and-lcec-activate-their-emergency-plan-in-advance-of-hurricane-dorian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/2019\/08\/fpl-and-lcec-activate-their-emergency-plan-in-advance-of-hurricane-dorian\/","title":{"rendered":"FPL And LCEC activate their emergency plan in advance of Hurricane Dorian"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Florida Power & Light<\/strong> have activated its emergency response plan Thursday as Hurricane Dorian continued to gain strength on its possible path to Florida. The storm\u00a0is now expected to hit the east coast of Florida early Monday morning, potentially as a powerful Category 4.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

FPL has 5,000 workers on standby and has been compiling and\npre-staging equipment, including miles of power lines and replacement\ntransformers, around the state.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Given the storm’s uncertain path, FPL announced it is on\nstandby throughout the state and is holding preparedness meetings and setting\nup staging sites across the state. FPL has also notified its partner utility\ncompanies elsewhere in the country to prepare to help respond in Florida, she\nsaid.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Dorian’s approach to Florida comes nearly two years after\nthe Sept. 10 Hurricane Irma landing at Cudjoe Key as a Category 4 storm.\nThe storm, which had maximum sustained winds of 130 mph during that\nlandfall, quickly weakened to a Category 3 and moved north through the\nmiddle of the state.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the\nstorm led to outages for 6.7 million electricity customers, about 64 percent of\nFlorida power company accounts. Hundreds of thousands of Southwest Florida\nresidents lost power to the storm, which also caused more than $1 billion in\ndamage to the region.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

FPL says it’s too early to predict how many Florida\ncustomers might see outages.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Lee County Electric Cooperative<\/strong>, which serves 200,000 customers in Lee County and parts of Broward,\u00a0Collier, 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ryan said LCEC has made arrangements with 100 out-of-town\ncrews \u2014 including line workers and tree trimmers \u2014 to provide support services\nin Southwest Florida.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

About 170,000 of the company’s customers lost power during\nIrma. Some living in rural areas and in areas like Lehigh Acres did not get\npower back for weeks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“If we are impacted and there are outages, we just ask\ncustomers to be patient,” Ryan said. “We know the power’s out. They\ndon’t have to call us right away and tell us. Just be patient.” <\/p>\n\n\n\n

You can find LCEC’s hurricane guide here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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\u00a0is now expected to hit… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":7324,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57,32],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44377"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44377"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44377\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7324"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44377"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44377"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44377"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}