By VIVIAN YEE
September 11, 2017
For most Floridians, the scary part of Hurricane Irma is past. Now comes the sticky part.
Though the storm fell short of the direst forecasts of raw destruction, it was starting to make up for that with the discomfort and inconvenience of life without electricity.
As many as 6.5 million customers woke up in Florida without power on Monday morning, and the storm was still chewing on power lines across the northern part of the state as repair crews were beginning to deploy in the south. Getting service back to normal in some areas may take weeks.
Air-conditioning, which might as well be air in humid, subtropical Florida, was being mourned from the Keys to the Panhandle. A mass extinction of cellphone batteries drove people to their cars to charge up, their need for communication and news eclipsing their worries about conserving scarce gasoline. Whatever was salvageable from the fridge became breakfast, lunch and dinner, cooked over gas or propane stoves.
Monday morning found the Berez family sheltering from Irma’s aftermath in a white van parked outside a CVS store in West Kendall, praising the vehicle’s air-conditioning and taking advantage of free Wi-Fi from a nearby Starbucks. They had been without power at home for more than 24 hours, and it was not going well.
“It’s so hot,” said Isabel Berez, 49. “We can’t sleep.”
Her 9-year-old daughter, Isabella, rated the experience “horrible.”
“It’s so hard to see at night,” she said, clutching a Barbie doll in a sparkly blue dress. “And I’m afraid of the dark.”
For her father, Enrique Berez, 54, the main frustration was not being able to get in touch with relatives.
“I need to talk to my mama, my brother,” he said, thumbing his iPhone.
More than 4.4 million of Florida Power & Light’s customers had lost power during the storm, some of them more than once, and utilities in Jacksonville, Tampa and other places were also reporting outages. About 1 million customers had been brought back on line by Monday morning, according to Eric Silagy, the chief executive of Florida Power & Light, and priority was being given to vital facilities like hospitals, fire houses, police stations and shelters, followed by major commercial streets.
It was not yet possible, Mr. Silagy said at a news conference, for the company to tell customers specifically when their service would be restored.
“We know how uncomfortable it is to be out of power,” he said. “We get it. We have families here as well.”
The most serious consequences of the power failures appeared to be at hospitals and nursing homes. By late Monday morning, some nursing homes in Florida reported they had been running on generator power for more than a day. In some cases, their backup power was not sufficient to support air-conditioning. Emergency officials were checking with individual nursing homes to see if they needed additional fuel or were having any mechanical problems with their generators.
The state requires nursing homes to have plans to maintain power and comfortable temperatures in emergencies, but some experts said the state had done little to enforce the rules or penalize nursing homes that did not follow their emergency plans in previous years.
Another way Florida felt the loss of power was on the street, where many traffic signals were out. In Tampa, drivers were edging cautiously into multi-lane intersections with no guidance on when to go. Roadside hallmarks of normalcy, like a Waffle House and a lavanderia, stood dark.
North of downtown, in Tampa Heights, power lines had become slings for the palms and oaks that had crashed onto them, leaving neighborhood residents among the 332,000 utility customers in and around Tampa with no power.
Enrique Lopez, 43, stood outside his house in Palmetto Bay, looking at a tree that had fallen over, blocking his next-door neighbor’s front door. He and his family had evacuated a few miles inland, and were expecting to come back to a home flooded by a storm surge. They were so relieved to find the house intact that Mr. Lopez shrugged off the electric failure, even as the hot morning sun continued to climb.
“If loss of power is the price we have to pay for a roof over our heads,” he said, “I’ll gladly pay it.”