Scott Powers
More than a half-million customers statewide including most in Brevard and Volusia counties have lost power due to Hurricane Matthew, the office of Gov. Rick Scott reported Friday morning.
The hardest hit areas, as expected, are the coastal counties from Martin through Flagler, with more power outages expected in coming hours as Matthew lurches northward toward Jacksonville. Statewide, 593,875 customers were without power at 9 a.m. Friday, mostly in those coastal counties, according to the governor’s office.
In Brevard, more than 164,000 customers, 54 percent of the county, had no power at 9 a.m., according to the governor’s report. In Volusia, 141,000 electricity customers had no power at 9 a.m., representing 51 percent of the county’s electrical base.
Martin, St. Lucie, Indian River and Flagler counties each had between 14,000 and 57,000 customers without power, representing between 26 and 47 percent of the base in each of those counties. In Palm Beach County, 47,000 people were without power, but that represents just 6 percent of that county’s power customers. Miami-Dade and Broward counties each were reporting fewer than 10,000 customers without power, tiny fractions of those counties’ bases.
St. Johns, next in line with Flagler for Matthew’s wrath, had 4,600 customers without power at 9 a.m., about 5 percent of the county.
Inland, Seminole and Orange counties have been the hardest hit so far, each with more than 25,000 customers without electricity. In Seminole that represents 12 percent of the base, and in Orange, 5 percent.
Smaller outages, of just over 1,000 to a few thousand customers, also have been reported in Okeechobee, Osceola, Lake, Polk and Pinellas counties.
