Nearly 1.2 million without power in Florida afte Hurricane Helene landfall

JEA crews work on restoring power lines during Tropical Storm Debby. Image via JEA

Nearly 1.2 million Florida power customers were without electricity as of 7 a.m. on Friday morning, after Hurricane Helene made landfall in the state.

That includes more than 390,000 Duke Energy customers, about 217,000 FPL users and more than 123,000 on JEA’s network, according to PowerOutage.us. It’s a situation power companies said they braced for ahead of the anticipated storm landfall late Thursday.

“We have already restored power while conditions have allowed us to do so. However, we have not seen the worst of this storm yet. We anticipate landfall will bring the most significant damage to our infrastructure in the Panhandle and Big Bend area that will likely cause extended outage durations,” said Todd Fountain, Duke Energy Storm Director, ahead of the storm. “Please continue to prioritize your safety first.”

In a few counties in Florida’s Big Bend, every customer tracked by the site has lost power for now. That’s the case in Taylor County, where the National Hurricane Center said the storm made landfall as a Category 4 hurricane. There, more than 15,000 remain without power. Madison, Hamilton and Suwannee counties all also report 100% power outages for all customers tracked by the site.

The area with the greatest raw number of people without power is in Pinellas County. There, nearly 236,000 await power restoration, including almost 232,000 Duke customers and nearly 3,400 on Tampa Electric.

In Duval County, more than 114,000 remain without power. More than 73,000 in Alachua County remain in the dark this morning, and nearly 71,000 are in the same situation in Leon County.

The greatest impacts of the storm on the state’s power grid were felt in the Big Bend area, where Helene delivered hurricane-force winds the entire time the eye was in the state and as it passed into Valdosta, Georgia early Friday morning. But as far south as Collier County, Gulf Coast communities saw a high percentage of customers who lost power. In Collier County, more than 13,000 remained without electricity and another 13,000 in Lee County remained without power.

Heading north, those still waiting for power to be restored includes 15,000 in Charlotte County, 48,000 in Sarasota, 35,000 in Manatee, 58,000 in Hillsborough County and 58,000 in Pasco.