Thousands Lose Power In SWFL Tuesday, FL Power & Light Responds

SARASOTA, FL — Thousands of people lost power in Southwest Florida Tuesday as Hurricane Elsa approached the region.

This includes nearly 4,000 people in Sarasota County and about 500 in Manatee County who lost power, according to the Florida Power & Light power outage map at 11 p.m. Tuesday. Most of those who lost power already had it restored by Tuesday night.

The company had a restoration workforce of 7,000 workers ready to “restore and respond to outages so they can quickly get the power back on for our customers," Richard Beltran, a spokesperson for FPL, said in a video shared to Twitter.

About 1,000 of these workers came through Sarasota Fairgrounds earlier Tuesday for their final preparations ahead of Elsa’s hit. During the storm, between 300 and 400 crews will be based at the fairgrounds, Beltran said.

“These crews are going to be working between bands to get power on safely and as quickly as possible,” he said.

FPL tweeted that workers will restore power lines throughout the night whenever weather conditions are safe for them to do so and winds are less than 35 mph.

“We’re working through this storm trying to restore power to these customers out here,” Wallace Albritton, FPL senior line specialist, said in a video shared by the company. “We’re just trying to do our part to get people’s lights back on because it’s just like our house. We want our family to go home to have lights, air conditioner. We’re just doing everything we can right now to get everything back up.”

Report or check the status of an outage by calling 800-4-OUTAGE (800-468-8243) or online here.

Related: Tropical Storm Elsa: How To Prepare For Power Outages

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