In a statement posted on its website Thursday, Florida Power and Light Company (FPL) said it has essentially completed restoration in Southwest Florida and is continuing to restore power to the hardest-hit areas of North Florida after Hurricane Idalia.
The statement revealed that more than 190,000 customers had been restored and about 9,000 customers were without power as of 8 a.m. on Aug. 31. Nearly 50,000 outages have been avoided due to smart grid technology, according to the release.
“FPL continues to actively restore power after Hurricane Idalia and will not stop operating until the last customer is restored,” the company said in the statement.
“Damage assessment teams are providing visuals of the damage in the hardest-hit areas of North Florida, closest to Idalia’s direct path, to get the right crews and the right equipment to the right places,” he added.
“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 through Florida,” FPL President and CEO Armando Pimentel said in the statement .
“As power and a sense of normalcy is restored, we remind everyone to stay alert and safe and to avoid any dangerous conditions,” Pimentel added.
In a statement posted on its site Aug. 31, Duke Energy Florida said it will restore 95 percent of customers who suffered the worst of the storm by 11:30 p.m. Sunday.
“This is the last time we expect most customers to be restored, although many customers will be restored sooner,” the statement said.
Duke Energy Florida noted in the release that it had already restored 156,000 customers as of 3 p.m. Aug. 31.
FPL describes itself as the largest electric company in the United States. It serves more customers and sells more energy than any other utility, providing clean, affordable and reliable electricity to more than 5.7 million accounts, or more than 12 million people, according to the company’s site.
Duke Energy Florida owns 10,500 megawatts of energy capacity, supplying electricity to 1.9 million residential, commercial and industrial customers in a 13,000-square-mile service area in Florida, according to the company’s website.
In a statement sent to Rigzone on Thursday, Chevron said it had begun redeploying support personnel to its Blind Faith and Petronius platforms.
“Production from all of our Chevron-operated Gulf of Mexico assets remains at normal levels,” Chevron said in the statement.
“Both offshore and onshore, Chevron is following our storm plans and paying close attention to forecasting and tracking Hurricane Idalia,” he added.
“Our thoughts are with the residents of Florida who are feeling the impact of Hurricane Idalia. Chevron remains focused on the safety of our workforce, the integrity of our facilities and protecting the environment.” , the company said in the statement.
In another statement sent to Rigzone on Thursday, Kinder Morgan said all of its facilities in Tampa and Charleston had resumed operations.
“At this time, we are finalizing our assessment of our facilities in Wilmington, North Carolina, and expect to resume operations tomorrow morning,” the company said in the statement.
In a statement posted on its website Wednesday, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced that EPA Administrator Michael Regan issued an emergency fuel waiver “to address a fuel supply emergency in Florida caused by Hurricane Idalia.”
In a report published on its website on Wednesday, the US Energy Information Administration (EIA) highlighted that Hurricane Idalia was affecting production facilities and pipelines on the US Gulf Coast.
A statement posted on the U.S. National Hurricane Center (NHC) website at 7:45 a.m. EDT on Aug. 30 noted that “extremely dangerous Category 3 Hurricane Idalia” had made landfall in the Big Bend in Florida.
“Data from an Air Force Reserve Hurricane Hunter aircraft indicated that Idalia’s maximum sustained winds were near 125 miles per hour,” the statement said.
As of this writing, the NHC site is tracking Idalia as a post-tropical cyclone with maximum sustained winds of 60 miles per hour.
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