Hurricane Ian is so highly effective that its winds have been simply 2 mph shy of turning into a Class 5 storm because it approached landfall in Florida on Wednesday. And it did not take lengthy for it to unleash its wrath on Florida's energy grids.
Ian's eye started transferring onshore at Sanibel and Captiva islands by noon on Wednesday. Earlier than 2:30 p.m. ET, greater than 640,000 individuals had their energy knocked out, in keeping with monitoring on poweroutage.us. Southwest Florida has to date bore the brunt of the influence, with Lee County — residence to Fort Myers — reporting greater than 226,000 outages, affecting practically 50% of its tracked clients.
Neighboring Collier County had greater than 99,000 outages reported on the identical time.
Reviews of outages proceed to increase north alongside the Gulf Coast, with main disruptions going as far north as Pinellas and Hillsborough counties. Some areas alongside Florida's east coast are additionally seeing outages, with greater than 29,000 reported in Miami-Dade.
This can be a growing story.