Thousands in Florida May Not Get Electricity Back for Weeks

LYNN HAVEN, Fla. — Mayor Margo Anderson drove through the neighborhoods of her small bayside city on Sunday to deliver some unwelcome news: The electric power knocked out nearly a week ago by Hurricane Michael might not be restored for two months.

Behind the wheel of a black golf cart, she made the rounds as shellshocked neighbors emerged from houses with busted windows and walls and front porches, the damage from the punches of fast wind, rushing waters and toppled trees.

“Just about every tree is down,” said Anderson, a fifth-generation citizen who was elected mayor of Lynn Haven three years ago. “The power lines are destroyed. The transformers are destroyed. The power grid is destroyed. We have to start over.”

That is the dire reality in the necklace of rural towns and coastal communities across northwest Florida that Michael gutted. Residents already reeling from the storm’s unexpectedly brutal winds now face the prospect of spending weeks relying on generators burning expensive fuel, or depending on aid from emergency workers.

Anderson’s grim prediction of two months of darkness might be a bit pessimistic. Gulf Power, the main utility in the area, estimated on Sunday that electricity would be restored in Lynn Haven, downtown Panama City and neighboring communities by Oct. 24, two weeks after the hurricane made landfall.

But Duke Energy, which serves another hard-hit swath of the Florida Panhandle, including Bay County and some parts of Gulf County, said it could not yet estimate how long it might take to get the lights back on in those areas.

“I just want to be realistic and warn people that for a while, it’s going to be pretty primitive living,” Anderson said.

Some 371,000 customers were still without electricity in Florida, Georgia, North Carolina and Virginia on Sunday afternoon, according to the Edison Electric Institute, while more than 2.3 million customers who lost power in the storm have had it restored. The majority of customers still suffering from Michael-related blackouts — about 182,000 — were in Florida, according to the state’s emergency response team.

About 2,000 people remained in storm shelters Sunday, and the storm’s confirmed national death toll rose to 19.

The power situation is worst in the Florida counties directly in the northward path traced by Michael’s destructive eye: 99 percent of customers remained in the dark Sunday in Gulf County, 98 percent in Calhoun County and 91 percent in Jackson County. Neighboring counties were nearly as badly off.

“It’s almost like a huge bulldozer went down the middle of Panama City and straight up through,” said Jeff Rogers, a Gulf Power spokesman. “This is kind of the Super Bowl of all big storms.”

In Blountstown, the city manager, Traci Hall, said the city had 40 linemen working 16 hours a day, but even so, the municipal power grid would take weeks to piece back together.

“It’s a total rebuild of our system,” she said. “Almost every single light pole in this city is on the ground. There is hardly any wires left hanging, period.”

The city is in the process of getting the poles, cables and other supplies that its municipal electric utility needs so crews can keep working at full speed, Hall said. In the meantime, she has advised residents to prepare to be in the dark for 30 days.

“I think everybody’s pretty much staying put at this point,” Hall said. “There are many, many that do not have a generator and can’t afford to purchase a generator. But I think that neighbors are going to help neighbors.”

The biggest municipal utility in the storm-affected area is in Tallahassee, the state capital, which was spared the worst of the hurricane. But given the city’s dense tree cover, 96 percent of customers lost power anyway. Eighty-six percent had service restored by Sunday afternoon, according to Amy Zubaly, executive director of the Florida Municipal Electric Association, which includes five public utilities affected by Michael.

In the Panama City region, amid destruction on almost every street corner, residents on Sunday continued to wait in long lines for hot food, bottled water, gasoline and prepaid cellphones that might get better reception than their own. The army of utility trucks in the area showed the scale of the recovery work underway, but they also clogged the region’s damaged roads.

Tony McClean, a cook at a Panama City restaurant, said the storm pounded his rental house with such ferocity that a pine tree punctured the roof, its jagged remains hovering over his bed.

“Hard not to look at that and not think about what would have happened to me if I hadn’t gone to a friend’s house at the last minute,” said McClean, 40.

At first, he said, he thought about trying to live among the shredded remains, but with no running water and no power in the house, it did not make sense. Then he got the idea to try camping, something he had never done. He figured he could ride his trusty five-speed bike and set up on some quiet patch of the city.

“I figure I can stay with friends for a few nights, maybe hit the shelter, then I will be on my own,” he said. “Everything is gone. I am on zero. If you haven’t gone through something like this, I don’t think people understand how bad it is.” In Lynn Haven, over the roar of chain saws, Anderson told residents living in a cluster of homes on the city’s east side to prepare for a long haul.

She estimated that more than half the city’s roughly 20,000 residents do not have generators. Or, in some cases, they have one that does not work.

Starlia Jackson, 56, spent Sunday afternoon huddled outside her camper with her dogs, Romeo and Pooh. The old camper rocked from side to side during the storm’s afternoon assault but survived in the driveway of her late mother’s one-story brick house. The house took in water and wind after the French doors in the back shattered, so now the camper is home.

Since the storm, Jackson has lived on strawberry soda, canned tuna and bottled water. The camper has a stove, but Jackson is low on propane gas, and on money to buy more. The house has a generator, but it is sitting broken on a tarp in the driveway.

She cannot take her two pets with her to a shelter, so for now she plans to stay, dragging a grill she has not used in years next to the camper.

“No power for possibly two months? Are you serious?” she asked. “I have no idea what I am going to do for that kind of time. You survive a storm, and then there is all the stuff that comes afterward that can be just as devastating.”

Wanda Grigsby stepped among the downed trees and limbs to find a cleared spot to stand in her yard. She stood in the brutal heat wearing shorts, a T-shirt and rubber boots. Hurricane Michael had brought her to tears: It ripped off chunks of her house’s roof and dumped an impossibly thick layer of pink insulation all over the kitchen, living room and den. Even if she cleaned it up, the power will not be coming back soon, and neither will the running water that relies on it.

“I have my 6-year-old grandson with me — no way can we do this,” said Grigsby, 54, who used to own a day care center and now is a caretaker for her mother. “I am going to stay with family in Jacksonville for a while.”

At one point, Anderson eyed a large white Federal Emergency Management Agency vehicle that had arrived at a parking lot just behind the city’s heavily damaged police station. The lot had become an outdoor community center of sorts, where one of the local dentists was grilling hamburgers and hot dogs, and residents could pick up free bottled water, diapers, canned goods and dog food.

Anderson jumped out of the golf cart and moved a portable street barrier to allow the FEMA bus into the lot.

“You have no idea how happy this makes me,” she said. “People need relief.”