Landfall: October 9, 2024 at 8:30 pm. Supposedly about 4 million customers lost power (source: Ron DeSantis press conference).
Mid-afternoon the next day:
Early evening:
The morning of the second day:
Apparently there was power at the big airport in Tampa because they resumed operations about 36 hours after the hurricane made landfall:
(Orlando had reopened a few hours earlier, so they too had power despite being in the middle of the Band of Destruction (TM).)
Afternoon of second day:
About 48 hours after the hurricane hit, the total customers out has declined from 3.4 million to 2 million:
The bad news is that restoration for some Floridians won’t be until 8 days after the hurricane made landfall. Here’s FPL’s estimate:
I’m not sure if people in neighborhoods with underground lines (like ours!) will get power sooner. Currently, 10 percent of FPL’s customers are out versus 17 percent for the state.
I can’t figure out why the customer numbers are so high. I thought that the transmission lines were designed to handle hurricane-force winds (and they were further beefed up after 2019; see Tough questions from reporters for Ron DeSantis). Maybe there are a lot of neighborhoods with above-ground powerlines for local distribution?
Strong independent female linewomen continued to work through the night, apparently…
2.5 days after landfall, it looks like Naples and Fort Myers are on their way back to normal while half of Tampa is dark. More than half of the Floridians who originally lost power now have it back (thanks once again to the efforts of linewomen who identify as female):
around lunch time…
Three days (72 hours) after landfall:
The pace of restoration seems to slowed down in the dark:
3.5 days after landfall:
Not a great situation in Tampa, with more than one third of customers without power. On the other hand, the total is down below 1 million compared to 4 million at the start.
Four days (96 hours) after landfall and about 500,000 customers are still out. More than 235,000 of them are Tampa Electric customers, which has only 840,000 total customers.
Florida Power and Light now says that they’ll have nearly everyone restored, even in directly hit Sarasota, by Tuesday night. (Also that they’ve thus far restored 90 percent of their affected customers, 1.8 million people who’d lost power at one point.) Speaking of FPL, if you were to watch their X feed you’d learn that electricity restoration is definitely not something that white males do:
And as of Tuesday at noon, FPL indeed had all but 38,000 customers back online. Tampa Electric (TECO) continued to be an outlier with 100,000 customers still dark.
Usually they target the biggest outages first, in terms of number of customers. It is the same model used in New England for winter storms. Underground utilities help if they isolate the outage to large transmission lines. I rarely lost power for more than a few hours in New Hampshire thanks to underground lines.
I always wonder about the network aspects of grid hardening work. It’s easy enough to say let’s bury the wires, put up concrete pole replacements, and so on. Here, the local utility spends enormous amounts of money trimming trees away from the HV feeder lines. But how well planned are the fusing and other protection mechanisms? For example, if a tree takes out a HV line on a side street, does that take down the larger feeder running down the main road?
Having lived through Hurricane Sandy here, we were in the center of town, near town hall, the fire station, school, etc. The local grid looked to be entirely intact, but we had no power for 3-4 days anyways. When I went to investigate, it was clear that the local utility had opened up the “frankenstein lab” switches up on the poles, presumably to facilitate repairs. The takeaway there, for me, is that not all outages are merely localized physical damage to the distribution network, sometimes it is apparently necessary evil for managing the network.
When I’m in FL and looking at how they do the grid, it’s certainly impressive, but your outage maps don’t look too encouraging relative to what we see here when a Nor’easter blows through. Hopefully Greenspun HQ has appropriate backup power on site. We favor propane, but Greta dropped me off her Christmas mailing list when someone ratted us out.
Anon: The Greenspun HQ does NOT have a generator. Nor solar panels and a Tesla battery (roofers here hate the idea of solar panels on an already-vulnerable tile roof; maybe solar panels make sense for the lucky folks who have lifetime metal roofs). My plan is to fill up the minivan before a hurricane and if it looks like we are going to be without power for a long time then drive to a hotel in some part of Florida that wasn’t trashed.
I think the utilities here in FL have a lot of “smart grid” equipment that can supply power to a neighborhood via redundant lines and route around a downed line. It will soon be 4 days since landfall and there are still 844,000 customers out (about 3.2 million restored), which is a significant percentage of the state’s 11.5 million customers tracked. https://poweroutage.us/area/state/florida
I was once part of a terrestrial wireless provider experiment in FL. To this day, I fear Terra-Cotta roofing. Not that I was the guy who did the installs, just the fear of damage problem having to climb up on that at all.
The restoral stats today look very impressive. So far, your FL luck is holding! If I lived there, I’d always feel like I was one storm away from the big one that took me out. In that wireless experiment, we were marveling at the sat imagery one day “why are there so many blue roofs?”. Answer: tarps. After a big blow on the east coast of FL. FL was great to work with, because there is so much LIDAR data available for ~free, given the reality of having to manage erosion and evaluate flood risk. Dealing with the bugs at night, around Cape Coral at least, was something to behold.
Anon: I talked to a neighbor who has been here since 2002. He said that the longest he has been without power was 2 days and that was after Hurricane Wilma hit us directly either as a Category 2 or 3 storm (this is apparently a matter of some debate, but Category 2 is the official story). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_Hurricane_Wilma_in_Florida
lived in Tampa bay area for last 25 years, this has been the worst recovery response i have ever seen. We live in one of the better communities(Fishhawk) with underground power lines, still lost power for 28 hours, and most of the other communities around us does not have power yet. Cannot get gas anywhere near and 50% of the traffic lights are out. I see cops at all these lights parked their vehicle in the median and sitting inside not controlling/directing the traffic, i am not sure why they are sitting inside the vehicle. I am sure they are getting paid overtime with hazardous pay.
Anon: I am sorry to hear this. Maybe you can answer my dumb question for the day: Why is anyone is trying to get gasoline? If people filled up before the hurricane, which I assume is standard, how is a typical family car (range of 400 miles) needing a refill right now? Where have people been driving the last 4ish days since the hurricane hit? Are they running out of gas because they’ve been idling their cars to use as an A/C refuge and phone charging station?
(Fish Hawk is part of Lithia, FL, about 20 miles southeast of downtown Tampa? It looks like you are reasonably far inland so the 28-hour outage is more than I would have expected.)
Phil: during Hurricane Sandy, on Long Island, we saw this same effect with gasoline, and even diesel towards the end of the outage. Two factors: people were filling gas cans for generators, but more importantly, constantly topping off. Once there is the slightest hint of scarcity, the hoarding kicks in big time. Gas, bread, milk, right?
During Sandy, Cuomo, Lamont, and Christy took forever to put their collective brains together and implement one basic control: odd/even filling. That was enough of a signal to break the back of topping off, and the “crisis” ended in day. Also, I suspect there was a lot of disaster tourism – off of work for a few days, let’s drive around looking at damage, charging phones, buying candy/stuff at the gas station.
What does ChatGPT have to say about all this? Will ChatGPT read the blog here and absorb reader comments into its fact base?
Anon: I’m not sure why more people don’t just leave hurricane-hit areas for a week. Disney World is open right now, for example, and hotels in Orlando are $150/night. Miami isn’t much more expensive. Getting back to normal after a big hit usually takes about 7 days so why not hunker down for 1 day (if one isn’t in an evacuation zone), see how bad things are, and then blow out of town on the full tank of gas that one’s car has? A schoolteacher, for example, can be pretty sure that he/she/ze/they won’t be needed until about 7 days after the storm (see https://www.wfla.com/news/local-news/when-do-tampa-bay-schools-reopen-after-hurricane-milton/ ) and, in the unlikely event that school starts up earlier than expected, he/she/ze/they can always say that an at-home COVID test from CVS yielded a positive result and, therefore, he/she/ze/they must quarantine for 5 days.
@phil Looks like lot of the people could not fill their tanks before as we ran out of gas 2 days ahead of the hurricane in our area. Also, as the power is out for more than a day, lot of people are looking for gas for their generators.