Florida makes monumental progress in power restorations less than a week after Idalia

KEATON BEACH, Fla. (FLV) – Power outages in Florida as of Monday morning sit at around 30,000, representing huge strides in restorations since major Hurricane Idalia made landfall just last Wednesday morning.

The storm brought massive destruction to primely the Big Bend region, with outages and impacts stretching considerably beyond the storm’s direct path, such as Tampa Bay and parts of the Panhandle.

However, power outage tracking shows that now, only the storm’s direct path is still host to notable power outages. In total, around half-a-million lost power from the storm.

Counties still host to considerable outages are Madison, Hamilton, Suwannee, Lafayette, Taylor and Dixie.

Counties directly outside Idalia’s eye wall impacts like Leon, Wakulla, Columbia, Gilchrist and Levy have no widespread outages.

The restorations come after Gov. Ron DeSantis, the Florida Division of Emergency Management and local authorities worked with private companies to stage tens of thousands of linemen early last week in expectation of those outages.

On Friday, power outages still neared 100,000, meaning a vast majority have been restored over the weekend.

“We were ready for this. We had search and rescue teams staged, National Guard, we had 1.2 million gallons of gasoline in the event of fuel shortages. We had over 30,000 lineman to restore power. And so as soon as the storm passed, our first responders were on the scene checking on people,” DeSantis said last week.

Florida’s disaster response is ongoing.

DeSantis activated a small business loan program to help relief efforts, celebrated private corporations like Publix and Chick-fil-A donating to recovery, along with activating the Florida Disaster Fund to help raise and disburse more money.