Duke Energy has mobilized 16,000 people, including crews from as far as Canada, to help restore power once Hurricane Milton passes.
They are staging materials and crews in Central Florida. The first priorities for restoring power will target critical facilities like hospitals and 911 centers. Customers are warned they may experience extended outages, potentially several days.
Duke is prepared to handle over a million outages, said spokeswoman Ana Gibbs. But severe damage, like that seen in Hurricane Helene, may require several days to repair.
She talks about their plans to get the lights on again with WUSF.
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Tell us what kind of resources you all have to deal with Milton's aftermath.
Duke Energy has brought in about 16,000 resources from across the country. They're literally coming from as far away as Canada to help our customers here in Florida. And I would say that basically, they are staged throughout the state. Some of them are in Central Florida, places like The Villages and Davenport. And the reason that they're there is obviously the path of this storm is coming straight across West Central Florida. And we just want to make sure that the materials, the crews, that the trucks, that they're all safe and they'll be ready to respond as soon as the weather is safe to do so, so once the storm passes and it is safe to do so.
So once the storm passes and it is safe to do so, what's your plan?
Throughout the year, we work very closely with all the local emergency operation centers and emergency management officials. They actually help us determine what is considered a critical facility for their area. So that could be a hospital, 911 center, law enforcement, even lift stations to ensure that each individual city, municipality, county, has their priorities, their needs, met as we begin restoring.
But while that's happening, of course, we're also restoring other facilities, and the way we attack our outages is it's really two prongs. First, we try to restore equipment that will bring on the most amount of customers. And I know that oftentimes customers get frustrated because they don't see a truck nearby. So if you don't see a truck in your neighborhood, it could mean that we're restoring a larger piece of equipment that may be further away.
So of course, we have to have our generation plants running to produce power. And then we go to the transmission lines, and we keep going down those lines until we do get into the neighborhood. Because, for example, most people are familiar with the transformer. If we try to fix that, but there's a larger piece of both equipment - what we call upstream, that hasn't been repaired - even if we fix that transformer, it will not come back. It will not energize unless we have fixed all the lines that lead out to that specific piece of equipment in your neighborhood.
So we could be looking at several days minimum before everybody's power is back up?
We are asking customers to prepare for what we call extended outages, and to be prepared to be without electricity for several days, in this case with an army of 16,000 crews, we are prepared to respond to more than a million outages in the Duke Energy service territory. And so what that means is basically one, if you're a customer that has whether it's a medical, medical necessity that requires energy, or for whatever reason, energy is vital to you, we definitely want you to take that in consideration as you make your plans. But we are definitely asking our customers to be prepared for outages, or what we call interruptions, that could last several days.
And a lot of people ask us when is my power going to come back on? I think Helene is an, unfortunately, just in our recent memory an excellent example of how it just depends how it impacts your individual neighborhood or area. Some customers are going to come on pretty immediately, but depending on the damage, it could take several days. And unfortunately, in Helene, it was the barrier islands that got the brunt of Helene. And in that case, our equipment wasn't just it wasn't just a repair. We call it a rebuild, where the storm surge lifted our mounted transformers and other very, very large equipment that served our customers, and literally the storm surge just washed it completely away. It was no longer there. So that isn't compared to a pole or wire that we just have to repair, you literally have to replace that entire equipment. Again, what we call a rebuild, and that definitely takes longer. And then again, in a storm like Milton that is this severe, we do anticipate that there will be homes and businesses with structures that are impacted so severely that it just won't be safe for us to re-energize the structure.
