After Tallahassee power grid blasted, an around-the-clock response, overloaded outage map
Friday morning's tornadoes and heavy winds wreaked havoc on Tallahassee, but line crews got to work almost immediately after the storm cleared.
On Sunday, for example, a power pole popped out as easily as a toothpick, its dirt-crusted bottom wagging in the air within seconds of the digger derrick truck giving it a tug. Minutes later, another hundreds of pounds of wood was being wiggled back in to replace it.
Mike Crow, the City of Tallahassee's assistant general manager for power delivery, monitored the progress that morning. He said the biggest challenge in repairing the electric grid was navigating the debris-dumped terrain. It makes it hard, he said, to even get an assessment of what workers need to get started on a repair.
"It's something we haven't seen at this level in the past," Crow said. The damage around town reminded him of the ravages of 2018's Hurricane Michael in the rural counties west of Tallahassee. "This essentially looks like a Hurricane Michael but in an urban environment."
And there is a lot of work.
As of 2:30 p.m., more than 41,000 households were still without power, according to a city outage map. The Public Service Commission, though, put the City of Tallahassee number at less than 29,000 in a 11:55 a.m. report.
Crews are aiming to have 90% of customers' power restored by Sunday night. But Crow wasn't sure when full restoration would occur.
"Full restoration, from an electric utility standpoint, means we'll be fully restored to every customer who can receive power," said Crow, swatting away a swarm of gnats.
"We have a number of homes, businesses that have substantial damage to their own infrastructure and they can't receive that power until they make the repairs on their end. But as soon as they make repairs, we come right out."
He stood near the entrance of Florida A&M University, surrounded by downed poles and pines. On that one-mile stretch of South Adams Street, workers had confirmed 23 broken poles. There were even more on intersecting streets.
"In order to get power up to this community, we've got to get this main circuit back on, then we can start working on the side roads," Crow said. "As far as our restoration efforts, it'll be ongoing. We're in a 24/7 posture and will remain that way."
The city has identified more than 150 damaged transformers. There are 337 confirmed broken poles across the network, too, but that number is expected to exceed 500.
More than 500 employees are around town making repairs, most of them mutual aid personnel from other communities who headed to Tallahassee within hours of the storm hitting, Crow said.
"We're extremely prepared for this," he said of the reinforcements that have effectively quadrupled their workforce. "We have a lot of material on hand. We've also reached out to additional mutual aid partners from a material stand-point."
City official addresses frustrations of powerless residents and about lagging outage map
Many are taking to social media to vent about the amount of time it's taking for their power to be restored.
"Nothing infuriates me more than when the house next door where nobody lives has power and I don't. For 2 days now," one poster on Reddit said.
Crow said to anyone who felt forgotten: "I completely understand, but I can assure you that you're not."
"You couldn't drive far without seeing one of our trucks actively working, and we're gonna be here until the end," he said. "So I encourage them to continue calling our customer ops center" at 850-891-4968 or 711 (TDD).
Some online have also noted the lagging numbers on the Tallahassee outage map. Crow explained the high influx of reports was making it take more time for the map to catch up. And due to the destruction, the city was having some issues with its communication equipment.
"It's taken some manpower hours to really clean that up, which those guys are working hard day and night, I may add, to do that," Crow said. "So that outage map will catch up but it is lagging."
More than a dozen power restoration trucks rumbled within sight, their raised buckets and workers outlined against the Florida Capitol farther north.
"Come through here tomorrow, and this will look a lot different," Crow said. "It's amazing that it took years to establish this infrastructure, and we'll rebuild it in a day."
But the fix won't be today for everyone.
"We're going into day three," he said. "I get it. I understand the point of frustration for some, but I want you to see we're actively working and also see just the number of resources that we have."
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This reporting content is supported by a partnership with Freedom Forum and Journalism Funding Partners. USA TODAY Network-Florida First Amendment reporter Douglas Soule can be reached at DSoule@gannett.com.
This article originally appeared on Tallahassee Democrat: Tallahassee utilities shares updates on power restoration, outage map
