About 1.5 million, mostly in Florida,
without power in Irma's wake
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[September 16, 2017]
By Zachary Fagenson
MIAMI (Reuters) - About 1.5 million homes
and businesses in Florida and Georgia remained without power on Friday
after Hurricane Irma, including 46 of Florida's nearly 700 nursing homes
caught in the deadly storm's path.
Irma, which ranked as one of the most powerful Atlantic storms on record
before striking the U.S. mainland as a Category 4 hurricane on Sept. 10,
killed at least 84 people. Several hard-hit Caribbean islands, including
Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands, suffered more than half the
fatalities.
Florida Power & Light, owned by NextEra Energy Inc <NEE.N> and the
state's biggest electric company, said it was working aggressively to
restore power to the 23 percent of its customers still in the dark.
The utility has never before had to deal with a storm affecting its
entire service territory, company spokesman Rob Gould said.
"It will go down as one of the largest and most complex restoration
efforts in history," he said. "Now we are literally into the
house-to-house combat mode."
The storm's death toll grew to at least 33 people in Florida after a
woman died of suspected carbon monoxide poisoning from a generator in
Palm Beach County, the Palm Beach Post newspaper reported.
A total of eight others died in Georgia and the Carolinas. North
Carolina reported its first Irma death on Friday, saying a man there
also had died of carbon monoxide poisoning from a generator.
Eight elderly people died earlier this week after being exposed to the
heat inside a nursing home north of Miami that had been left without
full air conditioning after the hurricane hit.
The deaths at the Rehabilitation Center at Hollywood Hills, now under
police and state investigation, stirred outrage over what many saw as a
preventable tragedy and heightened concerns about the vulnerability of
the state's large elderly population amid widespread, lingering power
outages.
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President Donald Trump (2nd L) and Florida Governor Rick Scott (C)
view Hurricane Irma damage to homes in Naples, Florida, U.S.
September 14, 2017. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst
"The governor will continue to review all ways to ensure tragedies
like this never happen again," Lauren Schenone, a spokeswoman for
Florida Governor Rick Scott, said in a statement.
Florida's healthcare agency ordered the nursing home on Thursday to
be suspended from the state Medicaid program. The center said it
plans to the fight the state's efforts to shut it down.
A timeline of events issued by the nursing home shows administrators
repeatedly called Florida Power & Light and state officials after a
transformer powering its air conditioning system went out during the
storm on Sunday. The center said it was informed that service would
soon be fixed.
Nursing home operators had put out cooling units and fans in an
effort to maintain reasonable temperatures and added additional
cooling units supplied by a hospital next door on Tuesday.
But it was not until multiple patients began experiencing health
emergencies, which promoted the evacuation of the center, that the
utility company arrived to make the repair, the nursing home said.
However, officials at the Florida Department of Health said the
facility did not indicate the extent of its problems nor requested
assistance in reports to a state monitoring database. In its status
reports, the center indicated that its cooling system was
operational for much of the time, according to the state.
(Additional reporting by Letitia Stein in Detroit, Brendan O'Brien
in Milwaukee, Scott DiSavino in New York and Colleen Jenkins in
North Carolina)
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