LEE COUNTY, Fla. (WBBH) — Hurricane Ian was the worst storm to ever crash onto the coast of Southwest Florida, leaving our area submerged and scarred.
After it hit, more than 2 million people were without electricity as power crews scrambled to get the lights back on.
“The restoration was a difficult one, as you might imagine,” Shawn Johnson, a spokesman for Florida Power & Light, recalled. “There were challenges across the board.”
But FPL, for their part, gives their response a passing grade.
“Within two days of the storm leaving the state, 75% of our customers were back online, and within 8 days, essentially all of our customers were restored,” Johnson explained.
He said the quick restoration was due to their work over the past two decades to strengthen their grid.
“About 45 percent of our grid is underground – of our distribution grid – is underground. And about 70 percent of our grid is either hardened or underground,” Johnson explained. “Which means that we’ve replaced those wooden poles with concrete or steel poles, or to that point, put those lines underground to help improve reliability for customers.”
New technology also helps FPL get your lights on sooner. They take flight after storms using drones and say the equipment is only getting better.
“Hurricane Ian allowed us to capture more than 50,000 valuable images that we sent back to our command center to identify what potential issues there might be on our equipment,” Johnson explained. “Then, before we could even get crews out there, we had an idea as to what that restoration might look like.”
If another big storm hits again this year – and we all hope it doesn’t – FPL said lessening the likelihood of an outage isn’t just their responsibility.
You can help, too.
“Take the time now – not before a storm hits, but right now – to have your trees trimmed on your property. To have a professionally licensed tree trimmer come out and trim those trees. Because vegetation is the leading cause of power outages,” Johnson said.
The post What you can do to lessen the likelihood of a power outage appeared first on NBC2 News.
