About 5 million customers, or about 10 million people, were without power on Wednesday morning in Florida, Georgia and the Carolinas after Hurricane Irma, down from a peak of over 7.8 million customers on Monday, local utilities said.
Most of the remaining outages were in Florida Power & Light’s service area in the southern and eastern parts of the state. FPL, the state’s biggest power company, said about 2.5 million had no power Wednesday morning, down from a peak of over 3.6 million on Monday.
NextEra Energy-owned FPL, which serves nearly 5 million homes and businesses, expects to restore essentially all of its customers in the eastern portion of Florida by the weekend and the harder-hit western portion of the state by Sept. 22. It will take longer to restore those with tornado damage or severe flooding, FPL said.
Outages at Duke Energy (DUK), which serves the northern and central parts of Florida, fell to 925,000 by Wednesday morning, down from a peak of about 1.2 million on Monday, according to the company’s website.
Irma hit southwestern Florida on Sunday morning as a Category 4 storm, the second most severe on the five-step Saffir-Simpson scale. It had weakened to a tropical depression on Monday.
In Georgia, utilities reported that outages declined to about 600,000 by Wednesday morning, down from a peak of around 1.3 million on Monday.
Other big power utilities in Florida are units of Emera (EMRAF) and Southern (SO), which also operates the biggest electric companies in Georgia and Alabama.