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PANAMA CITY, Florida (AP) – This is the most urgent need after a hurricane and sometimes the most difficult to meet: electricity.
More than a week after Hurricane Michael hit the Florida Panhandle on a destruction trail leading to the border with Georgia, more than 100,000 Florida customers were still without electricity, according to the Department of Emergency Management website.
On Friday, Martha Reynolds was sitting in front of her mother's stuffy home with family members, including several young children, in a low-income neighborhood in Panama City. The electricity is cut off since the day Michael hit.
Candles and flashlights light up the night, she said, and they activate a generator at night to power an air conditioner that cools four adults and five children.
"We try to eat on the grill and keep as much ice as possible," she said. "We all look at each other, we are all here, so it's a blessing."
A few blocks away, the family of Justin Ward met under a canopy under a shady tree in front of their hot and helpless home.
"We are doing it. The current is in a street. It's supposed to be here tomorrow, "he said.
Although more than half of the outages occurred in Bay County, where the storm occurred between the coastal beaches of Mexico Beach and Panama, rural counties had a higher percentage of people without electricity eight days after the storm. This includes Calhoun County, where 86% of the local electricity cooperative's customers did not have electricity.
"We are trying to make sure they understand the extent of the damage and that we are exploiting all possible resources to fix them as quickly as possible," said Gulf Power spokesman Jeff Rogers. most of the counties of Bay and seven other counties in the region. It does not serve Calhoun. "It was an unprecedented storm."
And it's not an easy problem to solve quickly. In Bay County alone, thousands of power poles have been destroyed or broken in half like toothpicks. Power lines fell on the roads or were thrown to the ground like stacks of spaghetti.
Many transmission line pylons – the huge metal structures that power the substations and then move them to specific neighborhoods – were left in twisted or knocked down piles.
Several power substations have been damaged and countless interruptions of connections with individual homes have been disrupted.
The new pylons and lines are rising rapidly, a visible sign of progress.
Long lines of utility trucks crisscross the streets of Panama City each morning heading to areas where service is not yet available. Workers hanging in buckets of nine trucks stranded in a street on Thursday, and the same scene is repeated countless times a day.
According to Rogers, a large portion of Gulf Power's electricity sources – solar, gas and coal – are outside the storm. Electricity is therefore available once transmission lines, substations and utility poles and lines have been repaired. It will simply act to reverse a switch.
A week after the storm, Gulf Power had replaced 5,600 utility poles, which can take as little as 10 minutes or more, depending on the damage to the pole, its connections, and the trees and debris that could make access to it. more difficult, said Rogers.
Gulf Power has about 1,200 energy restoration employees, plus 6,200 people in 15 US states.
But even far from the coast damaged by the hurricane, the rural counties of the north were also in trouble. In Jackson County, along the borders of Georgia and Alabama, more than 80% of customers were without electricity a week after the storm.
"Our power grid is totally destroyed," said Rodney Andreasen, director of emergency management in the county. "Right now, our main need is to restore power. Regeneration of power. "
According to Rogers, one of the major problems is that people are getting used to inactive power lines lying on the ground or falling in front of their homes. Once the service is restored, these lines could be deadly.
In Lynn Haven, families used power lines in front of their damaged homes as makeshift clothes, he said, "Oh, my God. It's a little scary. Just stay out of the way.
"We are starting to light up and people are resting after having been with them a bit," he said. "It's been a week without electricity and we're used to not being suspicious of them."
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