How we restore power

When outages occur, we know our customers want and need information about when their power will be restored. Our crews work to restore power as soon as it is safe to begin and provide our best estimates of when service will be restored.

As soon as FPL detects an outage or a customer reports an outage, we deploy a restoration specialist to conduct a situation assessment. This helps us assign the right resources, workers and materials to each restoration effort and provide customers an estimate of when repairs will be finished and power restored in their area.

During large outages, FPL follows an overall plan that calls for restoring power to the greatest number of customers safely and as quickly as possible. After a strong storm or hurricane, our restoration process is as follows:

• FPL restores power plants and affected transmission lines and substations, which are essential to providing any electric service.
• Simultaneously, we restore power to electrical lines and equipment that serve critical facilities such as hospitals, police/fire stations, water treatment plants and emergency broadcast centers.
• At the same time, we work to return service to the largest number of customers in the shortest amount of time - including service to the main thoroughfares that host supermarkets, pharmacies, gas stations and other needed community services.
• From here, we repair the infrastructure serving smaller groups and neighborhoods, converging on the hardest hit areas until every customer is restored.

FPL's comprehensive storm plan focuses on readiness, restoration and recovery. Prior to the start of storm season, FPL conducts extensive training to prepare our employees to respond quickly and safely after a storm. We also coordinate assistance agreements with other utilities for additional support, order supplies and equipment to have on hand for a restoration, and secure staging sites throughout our 35-county service territory, which will enable us to quickly deploy equipment and crews in the event a storm causes damage to communities in FPL's service territory.

In addition, we work closely with emergency operations officials throughout our service territory to update lists of infrastructure and facilities that are critical to the community, such as hospitals, police, fire, communications, water treatment plants and transportation providers. This information is used to establish priorities for restoration in any communities that might be affected by a storm.