US News Why Didn't FPL Do More to Prepare for Irma?

tom_mai78101

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(FPL = Florida Power & Light, an utility company.)

Four days after Irma, millions of Floridians are still stuck without power in the sweltering summer heat. Those outages have now killed eight elderly people trapped in a Hollywood nursing home without air conditioning, due to circumstances that FPL was warned about at least two days before the tragedy.

Many of those powerless residents are now asking hard questions of the area's power monopoly, which has spent millions of dollars fighting policies that would have strengthened the grid in the event of a major storm like Irma and, more broadly, stemmed the carbon-fueled climate change likely fueling monster storms.

"I am one of the many that has now been without power for more than two days as a result of Hurricane Irma," Elise McKenna, a West Palm Beach resident, told New Times via email. "My confusion came when so many of us lost power during the early hours of the storm that basically avoided us. We've been told time and time again that rate increases were to help prepare us for future storms."

McKenna is far from alone. FPL's workers on the ground seem to be doing all they can to fix downed lines and restore power to homes, and they deserve huge credit for working around the clock in awful conditions.

But the company's corporate and government-relations wings have serious questions to answer this week after quashing regulations that could have made the energy grid stronger at a slight expense to FPL's billion-dollar bottom line.

Hurricane Wilma, the last 'cane to hit South Florida, tore through the area in 2005 and killed power to 3.24 million of FPL's then-4.3 million customers (75 percent of the grid). Many of those customers had to wait up to two weeks for power to return. Since then, the company has spent more than $2 billion supposedly girding itself against the next storm, according to a Sun Sentinel piece published before Irma hit.

But after Irma — which by most reports brought only Category 1-strength winds to South Florida — by some measures the company did even worse. Despite all of those upgrades, an even larger percentage of FPL's customer base — 4.4 of 4.9 million customers, almost 90 percent — lost electricity this past weekend.


Read more here (Miami New Times)
 

Accname

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The good thing about an event like that is the potential to build it all up better than before. The bad thing is that the people in charge are probably too corrupt to do so.
 
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