Gov. DeSantis again throws cold water on expectations of quick power restoration post-Milton

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

Help is on the way when (and not if) people in Florida lose power from Hurricane Milton.

That’s Gov. Ron DeSantis’ reassurance.

But timing is everything, and impacted power customers may need to temper expectations given demands elsewhere, and not expect restoration as quickly as Hurricane Helene’s aftermath given competing needs in other states.

“The norm is that people are without power for three weeks, a month, five weeks. I mean, that’s the norm in these hurricanes,” DeSantis said during a briefing at the Emergency Operations Center in Tallahassee. He added that the state’s “efforts to really front-load” response has expedited those restoration times, but that may be more difficult following Hurricane Milton.

Utilities, he added, are “bringing people from further away from Florida than traditionally because we still have hundreds of thousands of people without power in other parts of the country, other parts of the Southeast.”

To that end, if utilities have “got to bring them in from Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, all those places, they’re going to do it.”

“That’s going to impact a lot of different utilities. We’ve spoken to most of them and they’re working to get people here,” DeSantis added.

“We had Helene and there were 2.4 million restorations, but 99.9% were back within a few days. There’s still hundreds of thousands of people without power in some of these other states that got hit by Helene. So there are crews working there, but they’re bringing people in from far and wide to be able to respond accordingly.”

On Sunday, the Governor had suggested power restoration would be more “challenging” than after Helene last month, given that resources were devoted to work in other states in the wake of that storm.

On Monday, DeSantis said that the power companies were “actively working to bring as many people in as possible” with major utilities, municipalities and co-ops cognizant of the need.