TECO leaders asking for patience as crews make progress restoring power

TECO making progress restoring power

Thousands of utility workers are making progress in their efforts to restore power to hundreds of thousands in the Bay Area. TECO says all electricity should be restored by Thursday night.

TAMPA, Fla. - As of Monday morning, about 190,000 TECO customers remain without power. At its peak, TECO saw about 600,000 outages from Hurricane Milton. Since the storm, about 6,000 line workers have been working around the clock to get the power back on.

"These guys work 16 hours a day from sun up until about 10:00 at night, they come in here. They sleep here at one of these eight bass camps. We’ve got eight of these set up and then overnight. We have other crews that work 16 hours during the night so that we have a constant presence on the system," Tampa Electric President & CEO Archie Collins said.

When they’re not working, about 1,500 of the line workers are sleeping at the TECO base camp at Raymond James Stadium. It’s one of eight camps in the Tampa Bay area.

Power outage tracker: How many Tampa Bay area residents are still in the dark?

As Collins explains, the order in which power is being restored comes down to location and need.

"We work at it sequentially. We need to make sure our power plants are intact. Transmissions are intact then at the distribution level and within that, then we have to break it down by customer class, who are the critical customers that we really need to get power to first – and for us here in Tampa, that would be hospitals, nursing homes, fire stations," Collins said.

Crews are working to restore power to hundreds of thousands of TECO customers in the aftermath of Hurricane Milton.

For now, TECO estimates power will be restored for Pasco County customers by Monday, Polk County customers by Tuesday and customers in Pinellas and Hillsborough counties by Thursday.

"We understand how frustrating and inconvenient it is to not have power between our own employees, our own TECO employees, and the 6,000 workers that we have brought in from out-of-state to undertake this restoration. I would just ask for some patience," Collins said.

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