Why some Tampa Bay residents got power back quickly while others still wait

Franceta Brown was on her fifth day without power Monday, and the hurricane snacks had long since run out for her four kids.

At their house in the Fish Hawk area of eastern Hillsborough County, the food in the warm fridge was out of the question. So Brown, 38, has resorted to takeout — but just once a day in an effort keep costs down. She typically relies on adding overtime hours to her job at the school district to make end’s meet, she said. But without after-school programs running, Brown knows her next paycheck will be slim.

“To not have power is a lot,” she said. “I have more bills than I’m going to have money.”

Hurricane Milton knocked out the lights to a whopping 3.4 million Floridians when it made landfall last week, almost three times higher than outages caused by Hurricane Helene barely two weeks earlier. For hundreds of thousands, the outages have lingered.

By the time Hillsborough County’s power is fully restored, it will have been more than a week since landfall, if Tampa Electric Co. stays on-target of its estimate for full return by Thursday.

The widespread outages have had a profound impact on a region trying to limp back toward normalcy after weeks of anxiety and destruction wrought by back-to-back storms. Without power, homeowners trying to recover from floods can’t plug in dehumidifiers to mitigate mold. Phone batteries dwindle as storm victims try to stay in touch with loved ones. It’s taken longer for schools and workplaces to reopen than after many storms in Tampa Bay’s recent memory. And the blackouts at water treatment plants caused thousands of gallons of sewage to spill throughout the Tampa Bay area, according to reports filed by local governments to the state.

Archie Collins, the CEO of Tampa Electric Co., said in a phone interview Monday that Milton caused more outages for the utility than at least any other storm in the past decade, if not the entire history of the company.

At its outage peak, almost two-thirds of Tampa Electric customers lost power, according to a Tampa Bay Times analysis. As of Monday afternoon, about one in five Tampa Electric customers in Hillsborough still lacked electricity, a slightly higher outage percentage than the approximately 15% of customers without power in Duke Energy-dominated Pinellas County.

Both companies have said that during mass outages, they prioritize getting the power back on first for essential services like hospitals, police stations and airports, as well as nursing homes and assisted living facilities. The lists of priority facilities are maintained by county emergency officials, the utilities said.

Then the companies make the fixes that can be completed the fastest that will restore the most households.

More than 1 million Duke customers lost power during Milton, or roughly half of its Florida customers. The company is nearly finished making fixes in other parts of the state, except for in Pinellas and Pasco counties, according to Ana Gibbs, a company spokesperson. But Duke estimates almost everyone in those counties will have their power back by the end of the day Tuesday, two days sooner than Tampa Electric’s estimate for restoration in Hillsborough.

Collins said he applauds Duke for working quickly. Tampa Electric crews are moving as fast as they safely can, he said.

Monday evening, about 131,000 customers were without power in Pinellas, while 135,000 outages persisted in Hillsborough and about 12,000 remained in Pasco, according to the utility data firm Find Energy.

“All I can say is for TECO, for Hillsborough County and for the portions of Pasco, Polk and Pinellas that we serve, this was the biggest hurricane in 100 years,” Collins told the Tampa Bay Times. “The amount of tree damage that was inflicted on the grid is unprecedented for us.”

Particularly unusual during Milton was the amount of damage that large transmission lines sustained from large falling trees, Collins said, because of the storm’s heavy winds and rain that saturated the ground. Transmission lines connect entire neighborhoods to the power being generated by power plants, and when this part of the “backbone” of the grid goes down, “you’re losing a lot of customers at one time,” he said.

Both Tampa Electric and Duke said that these larger lines must be fixed first as a way to get power back to the most people the quickest.

“It’s important to understand that if these larger equipment or power lines are not restored first, even if we fix that smaller transformer in the neighborhood, the lights would not come on,” said Gibbs.

Any community where there is still lingering flooding, or rural areas with severe tree damage, could be among the slowest to get their power back on.

Collins also addressed frustrated posts on social media from some local residents observing groups of line workers appearing to be sitting idle in parking lots.

He said that when out-of-state crews come into Florida to help, they do not have the local knowledge of the lines to begin work on sections of the grid until Tampa Electric first ensures it’s not live — including making sure that any power coming back onto the grid from generators or solar panels can’t electrocute workers.

“In those moments where people seem to be doing nothing, they’re just waiting for what we call clearance to begin working safely,” Collins said. He asked customers to be as patient as they can while the company continues to make progress.

“If you still don’t have power, you don’t give a hoot about the people who have been restored,” he said. “We understand how frustrating, how uncomfortable, how inconvenient it is not to have power.”

Times staff writer Teghan Simonton contributed to this report.

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