WSVN — It has been nearly 10 years since Hurricane Wilma left much of South Florida powerless. But a decade later, is Florida Power & Light better prepared to weather a storm and keep the lights on? 7’s Carmel Cafiero has the story.
When Hurricane Wilma came crashing through South Florida on Oct. 24th, 2005, it knocked out power to a record three point two million FPL customers.
Woman: "We’ve been taking showers with cold water. So that’s not good."
What began as an inconvenience turned into a major frustration as days turned into weeks without power. FPL received criticism about everything from the maintenance of its power poles to hikes in power bills.
Woman: "Well, FPL has more money than I do. You’re going to put that on me, plus going to tell me that I’m going to have to pay additional cost and FPL bills, and I haven’t had lights?"
It took 17,500 workers, 18 days to fully restore power after Wilma.
Carmel Cafiero: "Now, in October of 2015, Hurricane Wilma seems like a distant memory. But FPL has not forgotten 2005 and has been working to generate solutions in the decade since."
Bill Orlove: "We’ve moved beyond Wilma. We’ve learned our lessons, we’ve made many changes to our system to ensure that we’re going go be restoring service safer, quicker, more efficiently than we did before."
The company says it has invested more than two billion dollars to upgrade its system. Vegetation has been cleared along thousands of miles of lines and poles have been checked.
Bill Orlove: "We’ve inspected all of our poles within our system, 1.2 million, to ensure that they’re strong enough to handle the wind load. And for those that aren’t meeting our standards, we replace them."
Today, there are more than 19,000 additional concrete poles than during Wilma. This one, installed near a Hialeah Fire Station, is designed to withstand 145 mile per hour winds.
The majority of power lines are still overhead, not buried underground.
Bill Orlove: "Some people have said about undergrounding lines and whether that is a silver bullet, unfortunately it is not."
One reason, the company says, is that while underground lines perform better in wind, they can pose a problem when it floods.
There is, of course, a big unknown in all of this. And that is how these improvements will stand up in a storm. Fingers crossed. Carmel Cafiero, 7News.
FPL crews can also now view smart meters through an app to make sure power is restored to all homes on a street before they leave an area.