© Reuters. Steve Pizzano helps board up a friend’s souvenir shop ahead of the arrival of Hurricane Idalia in Clearwater Beach, Florida, U.S., August 29, 2023. REUTERS/Adrees Latif
(Reuters) – More than 173,000 homes and businesses were still without power in Florida and Georgia on Thursday after Hurricane Idalia made landfall on the west coast of Florida early Wednesday, according to data from PowerOutage.us.
Those totals were down from peaks of around 288,000 outages in Florida and over 217,000 out in Georgia.
Idalia plowed into the Big Bend region of Florida, where millions of residents had evacuated or hunkered down in anticipation of a dangerous surge of tidal water, but the storm’s power ebbed as it headed toward Georgia.
By Thursday, Idalia was a tropical storm in the Atlantic Ocean with maximum sustained winds of 65 miles per hour (100 kilometers per hour) located about 120 miles (195 kilometers) southeast of Cape Lookout, North Carolina, according to the U.S. National Hurricane Center (NHC).
Southern Co (NYSE:)’s Georgia Power unit currently has the most outages with around 65,000 customers out in Georgia.
Duke Energy (NYSE:) have the second most outages with around 29,700 customers out in Florida.
Major outages by state:
State Outages
Florida 91,200
Georgia 82,000
Total Out 173,200
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