(Photo: Florida Power & Light Company prepares materials and crews for Hurricane Dorian on August 30, 2019. Credit: @insideFPL on Twitter)Utilities in Florida are stocking up on materials and pre-positioning crews ahead of Hurricane Dorian. Meteorologists tracking the major storm expect it to become a Category 4 that makes landfall by Monday morning.
Florida Power & Light Company (FPL) activated its emergency response plan on Thursday, securing nearly 13,000 employees and personnel to help restore power. The utility, which operates more than 48,000 miles of overhead power lines, says it’s actively reaching out to customers and urging them to prepare for outages. Tampa Electric and Duke Energy are among the utilities with service regions in the state also preparing for Hurricane Dorian.
Meanwhile, utilities around the country have begun sending crews to Florida to help assist with anticipated outages. Members of the Municipal Electric Utilities of Wisconsin formed mutual aid crews and started dispatching them on Friday, WBAY reported. Louisville Gas and Electric Company and its sister company Kentucky Utilities are sending crews, as are utilities in Nebraska.
Since 2006, FPL has invested almost $4 billion in strengthening its grid, the South Florida Sun Sentinel’s Marcia Heroux Pounds reported. Despite the improvements and support from outside utility workers, 4.2 million residential and business customers lost power during Hurricane Irma in 2017, Pounds added, citing an FPL report to the Florida Public Service Commission.
“It took FPL 10 days to restore customers after Irma, which was a widespread storm in the state. But 50% of its customers were restored within one day, which FPL attributes to improving its grid,” she wrote.
Technology has improved since Irma, Kevin Spear reported in the Orlando Sentinel.
“Leaders of the region’s largest utilities — Orlando Utilities Commission, Duke Energy, and Florida Power & Light Company — say the organizations learned significant lessons from Hurricane Irma in 2017 and are better prepared with outage-reporting systems, damage forecasting, and staging of crews and materials,” he wrote.
A spokesperson for OUC said their customers now have digital meters that tell the utility when an outage occurs.
Communication with customers improved as well. Duke Energy’s communication system malfunctioned during Irma, but has since been revamped and tested, Spear reported. A spokesman for FPL told the South Florida Sun Sentinel’s Pound that their mobile app has been tested to make sure it can handle traffic for a storm stronger than Irma.
This time around, FPL has established 100 sites across Florida for assembling crews, materials, and vehicles, spokesman Tyler Mauldin explained to the Orlando Sentinel’s Spear. “They can be opened within 24 hours after a storm’s passing,” Mauldin said.
On Friday Morning, CNN reported that President Trump had approved a state of emergency declaration for Florida in anticipation of Hurricane Dorian, authorizing the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to coordinate disaster relief.
