While South Florida residents are bracing for the high winds and heavy rains from Hurricane Matthew, officials from Florida Power and Light are preparing to restore power to areas that will lose it over the next 24 to 36 hours.
FPL has spent over $2 billion in an effort to make power restoration move as quickly as possible should a storm knock service out. 450 power lines have been added underground, while nearly 135,000 miles of lines have been cleared of trees and vegetation – one of the main causes of outages when they hit lines during a storm.
Over 1.4 million poles have been inspected while 4.8 million smart meters were added, allowing the company to instantly know when problems come up.
FPL will have over 12,000 people ready to respond to outages – including 9,000 field crew members. Power companies from as far away as Texas and Massachusetts will be dispatched to Florida to help with restoration efforts.
If you need to report an outage, you can call FPL’s hotline at 1800-4OUTAGE or complete the online form. A map of where outages are occurring can be found be clicking here, as it will be updated as quickly as FPL officials can.
