Hurricane Dorian: Will Sarasota-Manatee face power blackouts like Irma?

Aug. 30--Southwest Florida may not get a direct hit from Hurricane Dorian, but it doesn't take the full force of a major hurricane to cause significant inconveniences for those living in a cyclone's path.

Residents of Sarasota and Manatee counties learned that in 2017 when Hurricane Irma plowed through the area after making landfall well to the south.

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Irma left 83 percent of Florida Power and Light customers in Sarasota County, and 72 percent in Manatee County, without power even though the maximum sustained wind speed recorded at Sarasota-Bradenton International Airport was 48 mph, well below hurricane-level sustained wind of 74 mph or greater.

The highest recorded wind gust in Sarasota County during Irma was 81 mph.

While there is still a lot of uncertainty surrounding Dorian's path, the National Hurricane Center currently projects that the hurricane will make landfall somewhere on the southeast coast of Florida early next week and move north up the state, potentially delivering a strong burst of sustained winds to Southwest Florida.

As of Friday morning, the probability of hurricane-force winds impacting the Sarasota/Manatee region over the next five days was between 20 and 30 percent. But there was a 70 to 80 percent chance that Dorian will deliver tropical storm-force winds to Sarasota and Manatee counties.

And that could be enough to put the lights out across a broad swath of the region.

It took 12 days to fully restore power in Sarasota and Manatee counties after Irma.

The outage was a major disruption -- shuttering businesses, keeping schools closed, displacing thousands of families -- and it even threatened lives in some cases. The tragedy at a nursing home in Broward County, where 11 residents died after the facility lost power and experienced sweltering conditions, attracted national attention.

Sarasota Mayor Liz Alpert said Irma was "devastating."

"I hope they've done some things since then to make it better," Alpert said of FPL.

Irma led some public officials to question the strength of the electric grid. The issue has been debated at the state and local level, resulting in legislation this year that will allow utilities to raise rates to pay for storm-hardening expenses, such as burying power lines.

But even without the extra money that the legislation will provide, FPL officials say they've been working to make the electric grid stronger after Irma and less susceptible to hurricane damage. Whether these activities be enough to limit the severity of power outages after Dorian remains to be seen.

"Every storm we learn from and we certainly learned from Hurricane Irma as well," said FPL spokesman Bill Orlove.

Tree limbs and other debris hitting power lines caused 90 percent of FPL's outages during Irma, according to the company.

Before Irma, FPL was trimming trees along more than 15,000 miles of power lines annually and that has continued, Orlove said. But FPL also has a pilot program now that buries power lines in residential areas.

Communities with buried power lines generally fared better after Irma, which was largely a wind event in most areas. This year FPL has six projects in Bradenton and 35 in Sarasota where power lines are being buried as part of the pilot.

"That's yet another example of how we learned from Hurricane Irma and over the last two years have been doing things a little bit differently," Orlove said.

The company also encouraged customers to be more proactive about trimming their own trees. State lawmakers weighed in on the tree issue this year, passing a controversial law that prohibits local governments from outlawing tree removal.

Property owners can remove a tree as long as a certified arborist or landscape architect determines it is threatening a building or human life.

While removing trees is controversial in some communities, there is wide agreement about the need to keep them trimmed, especially around power lines. Irma made that abundantly clear, Alpert said.

"People really started looking at what could fall on their power lines," she said.

Dorian will be the first test of whether FPL's actions after Irma have made a difference.

"We know that there are going to be outages during a storm like this," Orlove said. "But it's about the enhancements that we've made to the grid that help us get the lights back on faster."

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