Jacob Ogles
More than 2.83 million Floridians remain without power a day and a half after Hurricane Milton made landfall. That’s down from a peak outage of 3.4 million on Thursday afternoon.
A 6 a.m. report from the Florida Public Service Commission shows that more than 21% of Florida electricity customers still await power restoration.
That includes nearly 846,000 Duke Energy customers, 721,000 Florida Power & Light (FPL) subscribers, more than 551,000 on Tampa Electric Company (TECO) power, about 264,000 on one of Florida’s electric cooperatives, and more than 101,000 on city power.
The most widespread outages are reported in the Tampa Bay area.
More than 502,000 TECO customers in Hillsborough County still await service, as do more than 1,200 Peace River Electric Cooperative (PRECO) customers. That constitutes almost 72% of all power customers in the county
In Pinellas County, nearly 398,000 Duke Energy users and nearly 8,200 TECO customers need power restored. That’s about 71% of all customers in the county.
Further south in Sarasota, where Milton made landfall, around 300,000 still need electricity, about half of people in the county.
In Manatee County, almost 157,000 customers, more than 60% of those in the county, remain in the dark. That includes about 143,000 FPL users and 14,000 PRECO subscribers.
A few other counties have more than half their customers in outage conditions. Almost 82% of Highlands County residents, more than 54,000 people, have no electricity. That includes more than 47,000 Duke Energy users, over 6,800 of Glades Electric Cooperative customers and fewer than 300 PRECO users.
Almost 52% of Hardee County customers, about 6,400 people, still need service, including almost 6,200 PRECO customers and 200 on Wauchula city power.
On the Atlantic Coast, Volusia County still has nearly 147,000 without power. That includes nearly 79,000 FPL users, 49,000 Duke Energy customers, more than 18,000 on New Smyrna Beach Utilities and more than 1,200 on Clay Electric Cooperative.
