Florida Power and Light prepared for Hurricane Irma with military precision. It deployed 17,000 workers, heavy equipment, poles and wires to 30 sites in the field ahead of the storm. In the end, it took 60,000 workers from 250 utilities in 30 states and Canada to restore power to Florida and other Southeastern states in the storm’s wake.
About 7.8 million utility customer accounts in the Southeast lost power. Of FPL’s 4.9 million customers, 4.4 million of them lost power—the largest outage in the company’s history. More than 1 million accounts lost power in Georgia.