Thousands of homes and businesses were already with out power as Hurricane Debby made landfall in Florida this morning.
The storm made landfall as a Category 1 hurricane on Monday at 7 a.m. near the coastal town of Steinhatchee, according to the National Hurricane Center. At the time of landfall, more than 200,000 outages were reported.
By about 4:30 p.m., that number had decreased to about 17,000, according to the two utilities’ outage maps. Duke Energy reported about 12,000 powerless customers in Pinellas, largely spread throughout the county from St. Petersburg, the beaches, Clearwater and north Pinellas. The company reported another 2,000 outages in Pasco County, with most near the coast.
In a news release, Duke said it anticipates it will restore power to 95% of Pinellas and Pasco county customers by midnight. It will take longest for workers to bring power back for customers who experienced “extensive damage or flooding,” the company said.
Roughly 3,000 Hillsborough households lacked electricity late Monday afternoon, many of them in Tampa, according to the Tampa Electric map.
A little more than 19,000 outages were reported in Georgia in the last 72 hours as of 8:40 a.m. Lowndes County (which encompasses Valdosta) has the most with 8,379 outages. Georgia Power also provides an outage map at https://outagemap.georgiapower.com/
