Thousands of Sarasota County residents still without power

As of Friday morning, 60,000 Florida Power & Light Co. customers in Sarasota County were still without power — about a quarter of all Sarasota customers. 

At the height of the outages from Hurricane Irma, 218,000 of Sarasota County’s 260,000 customers had no power.

FPL said residents on the west coast of Florida can expect power restoration by Sept. 22 — 11 days after the storm hit, though areas hit with tornadoes, flooding or extreme damage could take longer.

Power is coming back throughout the county based on priority, County Administrator Tom Harmer said. Fixes to main distribution lines and restoration of power to critical facilities take priority over some residential neighborhoods.

“Thank you to the public for paying attention, thank you for taking action, and thank you for being patient,” Harmer said. “I will say that we’re going to need a little more patience as we move through this recovery phase as well. Some parts of the county and some individuals will be up quicker than others.”

As of midweek, 11 schools in the district were without power, delaying the cleanup. 

After Hurricane Irma passed through Florida, 4.4 million FPL customers were without power. More than 19,000 workers are responding to outages across the state, FPL said in a statement.