- FPL crews have worked around the clock, restoring power to customers just 12 hours after the last remanant of Hurricane Nicole exited the state
- About 13,000 workers were deployed for the restoration effort
Florida Power & Light Company (FPL) announced on Friday that it has restored power to more than 95% of customers affected by Hurricane Nicole.
As of 8 a.m., FPL has restored power to more than 465,000 customers, with roughly 18,000 customers without service.
“While our brave men and women have made tremendous progress in short order, we are laser-focused on the remaining customers who are without power,” said Eric Silagy, chairman and CEO of FPL. “We will not stop working until every customer is restored, and I urge everyone to keep safety top of mind as we complete restoration.”
With FPL completing its restoration in the southern part of the state, FPL said it will move additional resources into the hardest hit areas of the state, including Brevard County, where about 15,000 outages remain this morning.
FPL noted that areas close to where Nicole made landfall, crews are likely to contend with significant tree damage to get access to neighborhood power lines and other electrical infrastructure that serve only a handful of customers.
In Central Florida, Duke Energy was still working to restore power to about 1,000 customers in Orange County and approximately 1,500 customers in Marion County.
Nicole – the first November hurricane to make landfall in Florida since 1985 – came ashore near Vero Beach as a Category 1 hurricane early Thursday before slicing through the state as a strong tropical storm with damaging winds and heavy rain. Nicole’s final tropical storm-force winds ended in Florida around 8 p.m. Thursday.
Prior to its landfall, FPL amassed a workforce of about 13,000 men and women to support the restoration effort, including mutual assistance from 16 states.
FPL added that its long-term program of hardening the energy grid benefited customers during Nicole. Initial assessments confirm that underground neighborhood power lines performed significantly better than overhead neighborhood lines, as was the case six weeks earlier during Hurricane Ian.
Smart grid technology also helped avoid tens of thousands of customer outages during Nicole, according to initial data.