Florida’s Power Outages Expected To Grow Today
Hurricane Matthew battered the Florida coast with powerful winds, potentially devastating storm surges and torrential rain on Friday, leaving hundreds of thousands without power as those remaining in the storm’s path were ordered to shelter in place.
More than 300,000 people were already without power across the state of Florida and that number is likely to increase. The heavy populated “First Coast,” area around Jacksonville is still in the sights of Hurricane Matthew.
The number of power outages caused by Hurricane Matthew on Friday morning is way below the 2.5 million Florida Power & Light Co. predicted, but there still are about 1 million customers on the storm’s path.
The storm caused less damage than expected and the lower number of outages is thanks to mild impacts to densely populated Miami-Dade and Broward counties.
There were roughly 635,000 customers without electricity and about 157,000 of those already got restored statewide, according to real time figures last updated at 7:36 a.m. that don’t include a county break down.
On the Treasure Coast, Martin County was the hardest hit with almost half of its customers — 44,000 — without power at 6 a.m. Friday, according to county figures updated roughly every hour to two hours.
- St. Lucie County had 42,040 outages and Indian River County had 33,000.
- About 20,000 customers served by the Vero Beach Electric Utility lost power, City Manager Jim O’Connor said.
- There were 15,400 outages in the Fort Pierce Utilities Authority service area at 7:41 a.m.
Residents shouldn’t read much into Martin’s high outage numbers, spokesman Bud Fraga said. One downed line that serves many customers could be the reason why more county residents are experiencing loss of electricity than the other two Treasure Coast counties, he said.
The western eye wall of Matthew brushed by Cape Canaveral, home of the Kennedy Space Center, producing wind 115 mph gusts there at around 5:30 a.m. on Friday.
17-foot wave was observed 20 Miles east of Cape Canaveral as the most intense section of the hurricane churned just offshore. Meteorologists warned of an imminent destructive storm surge in central Florida.
