More than 170,000 residents were without power in Florida and Georgia on Thursday after Hurricane Idalia made landfall Wednesday morning as a Category 3 storm, according to PowerOutage.us.
Florida had the most reported outages as of 3:23 p.m. Thursday with 90,764, while Georgia reported 80,187.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis on Thursday said power was slowly returning to the state.
"Power is being restored quickly," he said. "All the linemen that were here, the tens of thousands, they are here still. They have not been released, and they're going to be working on particularly that area to get people back."
Florida Power & Light said its smart grid technology helped prevent some 50,000 additional outages.
"We continue to work day and night to restore power safely and as quickly as possible to our customers affected by Hurricane Idalia's destructive path across Florida," FPL President and CEO Armando Pimentel said in a statement. "As power and a sense of normalcy are restored, we remind everyone to stay alert and safe and to avoid any hazardous conditions."
Before the storm, Tampa Electric secured about 3,000 workers from other utilities, including line crews, tree trimmers, and damage assessors.
"The weather impact was not as severe as anticipated, and our crews were able to work through the night to restore customers during the storm," said Archie Collins, CEO of Tampa Electric.
Information from Reuters was used in this report.
Solange Reyner ✉
Solange Reyner is a writer and editor for Newsmax. She has more than 15 years in the journalism industry reporting and covering news, sports and politics.
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