U.S. President Joe Biden met with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis on Wednesday to assess the devastation from Hurricane Ian, and stressed the need for a united federal and state effort for the lengthy recovery ahead.
Search-and-rescue teams doubled back to examine tens of thousands of Gulf Coast homes and businesses after an initial sweep through areas ravaged by Ian, as the death toll topped 100 from one of the fiercest U.S. storms on record.
Utilities have restored service to most customers after Ian knocked out power to more than 4 million customers in Florida and over 1.1 million in North Carolina and South Carolina.
The utility with the most outages remaining, Florida Power & Light Co (FPL), said it expects restoration to remaining customers to be essentially complete by the end of Friday. FPL is a unit of Florida energy company NextEra Energy Inc.
Major outages by utility:
Power Company State/Pro Out Now Customers Served
vince
NextEra - FPL FL 5,730,000
92,571
Lee County Electric Co-op FL 123,855 238,000
Total Out
216,426
Source: PowerOutage.us and power companies
(Reporting by Harshit Verma in Bengaluru and Scott DiSavino in New York; editing by Jason Neely)
