Rapid Recovery in Florida: ‘All But 1.86% of the State’ Has Power After Hurricane Ian

Florida Power & Light Co. (FPL) emergency response team workers following Hurricane Ia
Eva Marie Uzcategui/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Hannah Knudsen

The vast majority of Florida residents who lost power during Hurricane Ian have had their power restored, Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) announced on Thursday.

Millions of Floridians had their power knocked out after Hurricane Ian barreled across the state after pummeling the west coast. According to Reuters, up to four million lost power in the Sunshine State. But now, one week later, that figure is drastically smaller, as millions have had their power restored. Gov. DeSantis largely attributed that to pre-storm planning, as tens of thousands of linemen were prepared to respond in the aftermath of the Category 4 storm.

“Because of the pre-planning on this hurricane, with 42,000 utility workers stationed in the state of Florida prior to landfall, which has never been done at that scale, we’ve been able to now restore — all but 1.86 percent of the state of Florida has power,” DeSantis announced to applause.

“So basically, as of 12 o’clock, it was about 200,000 people out of a massive state,” he said. “I mean, the storm left Florida Thursday evening of last week and so here we are here.”

While DeSantis said some areas require more of a rebuild, progress is being made in Lee County — one of the counties most severely affected by the storm — too:

FPL I think is almost totally restored in Lee County. Some of the areas they have like Fort Myers Beach is going to require a rebuild. And it’s going to require–  maybe the homes to have something happen because they may not be able to take power. …  I told Kevin, so we got all these great linemen in the state. They’re finishing all these other areas. Don’t send them back to Texas or Alabama, send them to southwest Florida. So they’ve been coming down. They’re helping now get it done.

DeSantis added that “there’s more linemen now” in certain areas of Lee County than “probably anywhere per capita in the country, right?”

Indeed, at the time of this writing, data from PowerOutage.us showed 186,863 without power in the Sunshine State. Most of those outages are centralized in Lee County.

Prior to the storm hitting, DeSantis assured Floridians that there were over 42,000 linemen ready to respond to the storm:

Earlier this week, a video emerged showing a cavalry of linemen entering Cape Coral in Lee County, generating thanks from Florida first lady Casey DeSantis. 

“Thankful for all our linesmen. Thankful for @GovRonDeSantis leadership,” she said:

WATCH the press conference below: 

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