Hurricane Irma Hits Central Florida Hard!

     A Central Florida Street gives insight on going through Hurricane Irma and what it’s like living with no power from September 3 to September 10.

Satellite image of Hurricane Irma from NASA. 

“By walking down the street there was very little damage, some trees knocked down. The worst part of the storm was the loss of power” a resident of the street affected by the storm says.

No  serious damage to houses and no flooding damage either. The biggest issue the street residents faced was living a week with no power. They were apart of millions that Irma affected after the storm.

 The street is located in Brevard County and the county’s power is provided by FPL. With over half a million residents in Brevard and almost all residents without power after the storm, it was too much for FPL to handle. I talked with one person who had conflict with how FPL was handling the issue.

“I called (FPL) after the storm to report my outage. I got an automated message saying an estimate of two or three days and telling me to not report of an outage because they already know. A block away from us has power and here we are…no power. I felt like we could have been forgotten about”.

FPL has set a record with over 3 million customers without power after Irma hit according to an article on Florida Today, written by Dave Berman.

After a long hot week power did return to the street and surrounding areas. But troubles were still occurring. “I spent too much money on stuff I needed to live without power. I had to spend even more money replacing all the food in my refrigerator and freezer also.” another resident on the street explained how hard it was to come back after the storm.

Luckily, if you are low income and receive benefits you are eligible for some more government aid provided by FEMA and EBT/SNAP. Almost all the interviews I had with people who liv on the street says something about how difficult it was to handle all the perishable they had in their freezer of refrigerator. Some even said they just threw away all there cold or frozen food before the storm so they had less to worry about.

An article from Pundifact written by Miriam Valverdea stated that food companies issued warnings to Floridians was issued about frozen foods after the storm saying certain perishable foods could be poisoned if not refrigerated or kept frozen. Certain foods like milk, fish, eggs and chicken especially.

Even though the street and surrounding areas were returned power in what seemed like a long time, other areas in Florida are still without power. Thousands of FPL customers are still reported without power, according to a Sun-Sentinel article, written by Aric Chokey. Another person explains how the street shouldn’t think they got the worse of the damage;

“It was a week for people around here to get power and we think it was unbearable. It’s hard to think about all the people down south (Miami) dealing with almost a month of no power and flooding issues as well.”

An update to this article, according to an article from the Miami Herald Irma has caused almost $20 billion in damages and in an article from CBS reports that the impact from Irma has killed 69 in Florida. It will take many years for states affected by Irma to recover to a comfortable state.