Florida Power & Light Company said today that efforts to restore service to customers affected by Tropical Storm Gabrielle continue on track. All customer electrical service will be essentially restored by the end of the day.

FPL said it will keep extra crews in the west coast and north Florida areas for the next few days to handle isolated outages. Currently, more than 1,600 personnel are directly engaged in the restoration effort in Sarasota and Manatee counties.

"Our workers will stay on the job until we have restored power to every customer," said Armando Olivera, senior vice president of power systems. "I am very proud of our employees and their dedication to serving our customers. We regret any inconvenience to our customers caused by Tropical Storm Gabrielle."

FPL's restoration strategy is to first restore power to essential facilities such as hospitals, water treatment facilities, gas companies, police and fire and communications. Crews then repair the parts of the system that will restore the largest number of customers in the shortest period of time, followed by individual outages.

At 10 a.m. Sunday, FPL was finishing restoration efforts to approximately 83,000 homes and businesses. Outages by county were:

  West Coast           Northeast
  Charlotte - 3,000    Flagler - 1,000
  DeSoto - 1,000       Putnam - 1,000
  Manatee - 33,000     St. Johns - 6,000
  Sarasota - 38,000

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SOURCE: Florida Power & Light Company