Hurricane Idalia came through northern Florida on Wednesday, August 30. Roughly 250,000 customers lost power. The situation at 10:00 am today, three days later:
It looks as though much of the problem is with two areas served by coop power companies (the numbers below are total customers then customers out):
They’re serving counties that were in the direct path of the storm. I’m wondering if they don’t have the hurricane-hardened infrastructure that we have in South Florida, where hurricanes regularly occur. Our transmission lines here are high above any trees that might fall. Delivery to neighborhoods is via underground cables. Is the problem up north simply that fallen trees have cut vulnerable lines? “About 40,000 linemen” were pre-positioned for Idalia, as for Hurricane Ian. But it seems as though the problem of restoration is tougher, at least on a per-customer basis (the affected counties are sparsely populated so maybe an entire power grid has to be reconstructed to restore 10,000 or 20,000 customers).
As the Bobs asked in Office Space, what is it that the 40,000 linemen actually do?
Separately, with all of the progress that has been made since Joe Biden took office, why don’t we have a gender-neutral term to replace “lineman”? What about electric grid workers who identify with one of the other 73 gender IDs recognized by Science?
Related:
- Non-profit versus for-profit in the power restoration Olympics (see the comments for snapshots of how power restoration unfolded after Ian)
RIP Florida-man Jimmy Buffet, inventor of the buffet restaurant.
Is there any way to track how many of the impacted citizens have generators to support their infrastructure? I can’t remember the specifics of the Infrastruture Bill but perhaps Suwannee Electric can apply for some funds to support the upgrades needed to reduce outage.
On a related note, is Kevin Costner aware of this outage from a Native American perspective?
In Seattle metro after every winter storm bunch of people loose power. Sometimes for multiple days. After all these years, can we just upgrade the infrastructure and bury the cables? Apparently not.
In Florida, which should be an easy place to buy power lines (no rocks?), FPL says that it costs 33% more to do underground in a new subdivision. https://www.fpl.com/reliability/underground-conversions/faq.html
What about retrofit? “The two key drivers contributing to the cost calculations are labor and materials. Depending on these factors, underground facilities can cost anywhere from $500,000 per mile to more than $4 million per mile. While these figures have a considerable amount of variability, there is a process in place where we generate a “ballpark” estimate to assist in determining the magnitude of the cost a community may be considering.”
Does it make sense to make this investment? Not if you believe Professor Dr. Joe Biden, Ph.D. when he/she/ze/they says that climate change is an existential threat to humanity. If we’re all about to be fried by a Venus-style atmosphere, what difference does it make whether powerlines are above or under the ground?
In Clarkson’s Farm (great TV show, btw) tv host and dude with a tractor lay underground cable successfully. Surely with modern equipment it’s not that hard, they can do it even in England! (At least on TV). But not in the USofA.
I don’t get current costs of infrastructure projects – how can highway intersection cost the same as entire company manufacturing something? And how we can afford such intersections. And so on.
September 3 at 10 pm: nearly 30,000 customers remain without service, 25,000 of them from the two coops.
https://svec-coop.com/news-releases/svec-restoring-power-after-hurricane-idalia/ says “Due to the extent of the damage done to SVEC’s grid, the co-op recommends that it’s consumer-members prepare to be without power for up to 2 weeks.”
It looks as though Cedar Key is being rebuilt: https://www.tallahassee.com/story/news/hurricane/2023/09/03/how-cedar-key-in-florida-is-rebuilding-after-hurricane-idalia/70750337007/
(there aren’t any NOTAMs for KCDK, the airport there. Maybe anyone capable of landing on the short runway can just show up now)