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The
blaze, which lit up the night sky with raging balls of flame
several stories high, engulfed one of three transformers housed
at the stricken electrical substation in the city, Florida Power
& Light (FPL) spokesman Bill Orlove said.
A number of witnesses quoted in local media accounts said they
heard multiple explosions at about the time the blaze erupted.
The fire and resulting blackout came as Fort Lauderdale played
host to throngs of visiting college students converging on the
city and neighboring South Florida communities this month for
spring break festivities, an annual beer-soaked rite of youthful
revelry.
Nearly 32,000 Broward County homes and businesses were without
electricity shortly after the fire erupted, according to a "Powertracker"
map posted on the website of the utility, a subsidiary of
NextEra Energy, Inc..
Company spokesman Chris McGrath said the outage initially left
about 22,000 Fort Lauderdale customers without electricity -
nearly a fifth of FPL's service base in the city north of Miami.
"We are aware of a service interruption and a fire at a
substation in Fort Lauderdale," McGrath said. "Crews are on site
working to restore power safely and as quickly as possible."
The number of Broward County customers without electricity fell
to about 21,300 within an hour of the first reports of the
blackout, and Orlove said all but about 7,500 had power restored
about an hour later.
Orlove said the cause of the fire was under investigation, but
Fort Lauderdale police said on Twitter that the power outage was
caused by a lightning strike on the FPL substation.
(Reporting by Steve Gorman and Dan Whitcomb in Los Angeles;
Editing by Sandra Maler and Richard Pullin)
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