Hurricane Helene leaves over 1 million Floridians without power

More than 1.28 million homes and businesses in Florida were without power on Friday as Hurricane Helene made landfall as one of the most powerful storms to hit the United States, according to data from PowerOutage.us. The utility company with the most number of customers affected was Duke Energy, which had over 380,000 clients without power. It was followed by Florida Power & Light Company, with more than 220,000 customers cut off in the state. “We anticipate landfall will bring the most significant damage to our infrastructure in the Panhandle and Big Bend area that will likely cause extended outage durations,” Todd Fountain, Duke Energy storm director, said in a statement. Here are the major outages by utility in Florida: Companies with most customers affected outages Florida Power & Light Company222,516 Duke Energy386,706 Tampa Electric78,998 JEA131,831 Suwannee Valley Electric Cooperative28,848 Withlacoochee River Electric Coop42,526 Gainesville Regional Utilities55,430 Tri-County Electric Coop20,056 Clay Electric Coop105,855 Central Florida Electric Cooperative32,312 Talquin Electric Cooperative35,167 City of Tallahassee53,071 Total (includes some other companies)1,280,503 —Rahul Paswan, Reuters