Residents in the dark after storm

More than 400,000 customers were without power for up to three days after “a highly unusual group of storms” ripped through Central Florida last week. And former Maitland Mayor Doug Kinson said it took too long to fix.

Standing in front of his home on Covewood Trail in Maitland on Friday, just a few feet from a green extension cord snaking its way through his yard and across the street to a neighbor’s home, he said he’d been without power for two days. The power cord was keeping his refrigerator running, but nothing else, he said.

“We’re lucky now, since the weather’s been bearable,” Kinson said. “But tomorrow, it’s gonna be hot.”

At least two of Kinson’s neighbors had already left the neighborhood, opting to spend the last two nights in hotels rather than deal with the heat and humidity.

“I threw the stuff in the fridge away,” Jerry Gladstein said. “We stayed in a hotel last night, and we’re doing it again tonight. There’s no reason for [the power] to be out now.”

Neighbor Javier Delgado waited out the power restoration at home. He was one of more than a dozen residents borrowing power from across the street.

“I’m just sitting watching for the lights to come on,” he said, adding that on his block, a power outage isn’t unusual. “The power transformer blows every other month it seems.”

Progress Energy spokesman Tim Leljedal said that a massive storm ripped through trees and damaged power lines over two days, causing as much damage as the last major tropical storm that hit the area in 2008.

“We saw near hurricane-force winds Wednesday,” Leljedal said. “Then we saw them again on Thursday while crews were working to restore power. That definitely presented some unique challenges for us.”

Due to the amount of customers who lost power, Progress Energy had to pull in employees from three other states to handle the restoration effort. Crews worked 24 hours a day for more than three days to get power back into homes and businesses.

Leljedal said that Progress Energy works on power lines that transmit to the most homes first, moving to smaller outages later. The outage affecting Kinson’s block of 17 houses had a lower priority than other areas that could see thousands of homes with power if one line was restored, Leljedal said.

“We understand it’s sometimes frustrating for customers,” he said. “Sometimes outages affecting smaller areas of customers can take longer to restore, especially when there’s damage in the area.”

The storm, which dropped at least three tornadoes in Central Florida, caused a tree branch to sever the line in Maitland. But in other areas, there were widespread reports of downed trees smashing through the roofs of houses.

Leljedal said the amount of damage was similar to that caused by Tropical Storm Fay, which dumped more than two feet of rain on the area in less than a week in 2008.

Despite similar levels of damage, Leljedal said Progress Energy was able to restore power in half the time.

“Even though it was the same amount of customers restored, it took six days in 2008, whereas we could repair the damage (from the recent storm) in three days this time,” he said.