Reply #72: 2.5 million Florida Power & Light customers in the dark [View All]

[UpInArms]

http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story.asp?guid=%7B818E9A36%2DE7EE%2D4DF0%2DBBA5%2D7AC8F5984374%7D&siteid=mktw

WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) -- Roughly 2.5 million homes and businesses were in the dark Monday morning as Hurricane Wilma pounded the Florida peninsula, utilities said.

Wilma made landfall in Florida early Monday as a Category 3 hurricane before being downgraded to a Category 2 storm with winds speeds of 90 miles per hour.

Wilma is the eighth major hurricane to hit Florida in the past 14 months.

Florida Power & Light, a utility subsidiary of FPL Group Inc. (FPL), said 2.5 million of its 4.3 million customers were without power on Monday.

More than half of the outages - 1.7 million - are in Miami Dade and Broward Counties, along the southeast coast of Florida, said Tim Pagel, spokesman for the utility.

West Palm Beach County has an additional 430,000 outages and Sarasota, in the southwest, has reported 400,000 customers without power, Pagel said.

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