Thirteen million without power, seven dead after Hurricane Irma wreaks havoc in Florida
By
Niles Niemuth
12 September 2017
Hurricane Irma was downgraded to a tropical storm Monday as it made its way north to Georgia and South Carolina, leaving in its wake an estimated $100 billion in damage across the entire state of Florida. As of this writing, seven people have died of storm related injuries in Florida. In the Caribbean, 37 have been killed including 10 deaths in Cuba where the storm made landfall on Friday.
The full impact of the storm was less than had been feared, due to shifts in its trajectory over the weekend. However, the damage is still massive and has further exposed the decrepit state of US infrastructure.
Nearly two-thirds of Florida’s population, or approximately 13 million people, were still without power Monday night after Irma’s high winds brought down trees and power lines across the state and record storm surge flooding inundated cities up and down Florida’s Atlantic and Gulf coasts.
“People need to be prepared for some prolonged and extended outages,” Eric Silagy, president and CEO of Florida Power and Light, which provides power to half the state’s population, warned on Monday.
Some areas of the state are expected to be without power for weeks, as miles of downed power lines will not only have to be restored, but significant sections of the state’s power infrastructure will have to be rebuilt.
“‘Restore’ may not capture the full sense of where we are,” Southern Company CEO and Chairman Thomas Fanning told CNBC. “For the very hard impacted areas, I think you’re in a ‘rebuild’ area. That’s a big deal. People need to understand this is going to take perhaps weeks, not days, in some areas.”
Fanning, a co-chair of the…