Hurricane Idalia leaves more than 300,000 without power

More than 300,000 people were left without power Thursday morning in Florida, Georgia, and the Carolinas after Hurricane Idalia traversed through the area and returned to the Atlantic Ocean, after being downgraded to a tropical storm.

The hurricane made landfall in Florida on Wednesday morning as a Category 3 hurricane, with maximum sustained winds of 125mph. It entered Georgia with top wind speeds of 90mph, and was downgraded to a tropical storm Wednesday afternoon as its wind speeds decreased to 60mph. It continued into South Carolina on Wednesday night, and into North Carolina on Thursday morning.

Restoration efforts have already begun, as hundreds of thousands of customers have lost power.

Nearly half a million customers in Flordia and Georgia alone lost power, AP reports, and more than 300,000 customers in the Southeast are still without power Thursday morning, according to outage trackers from poweroutage.us and Star News Online.

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More than 30,000 utility workers in Flordia, where more than 140,000 customers are still without power, began to repair downed power lines and poles, AP reports.

Georgia Power has begun restoration and assessment efforts, and the utility said power had been restored to more than 40,000 customers by Wednesday afternoon, when 132,000 customers were without power. Nearly 100,000 customers are still without power in Georgia as of Thursday morning.

Dominion Energy workers in South Carolina began restoring power to the more than 23,000 customers who lost it, and the utility’s spokesperson said power should be restored for the remaining customers by the end of the day, although “severe damage” may slow restoration in some areas where customers are unable to receive power.

Duke Energy said it has restored power for more than 60,000 customers in North Carolina already, and said it will also restore power for all customers who can receive it by the end of the day. Roughly 23,000 customers are still without power in both Carolinas.

Originally publushed by Sean Wolfe on Power Grid.