Miami- 95% of subscribers in Florida have already recovered their electricity service, five days after Hurricane Ian made landfall in Cayo Costa, in the southwest of the state, with winds of 240 km/h that caused catastrophic damage, assured this Monday the state governor, Ron DeSantis.
DeSantis said at a press conference in Cape Coral, in Lee County, one of the areas most affected by the hurricane, that only 5% of subscribers in the state remain without electricity.
The recovery of the service, however, is very uneven, since in some areas of the west coast nearly half of the population still remains without electricity, while other areas, such as the southeast, practically did not suffer the impact of the hurricane.
RELATED“Thousands of people are working on the ground to restore the energy infrastructure,” stressed DeSantis, who said that the state authorities are carrying out joint work aimed at the population recovering all services, including drinking water and supplying food to the most isolated areas.
“The work already done means that in a few days service has been restored to more than 2 million people who lost it with the passage of the hurricane,” the governor added.
DeSantis gave the example of Charlotte County, one of the hardest hit, where, as he said, 58% of subscribers have recovered service.
Regarding infrastructure, he announced that work is being done so that by the end of this week the bridge that links the town of Fort Myers with Pine Island, which was destroyed by the hurricane, can already be used, although he clarified that it is a temporary solution.
DeSantis pointed out that for the Sanibel bridge, the only access that connects that small island with land, a similar process will be carried out that will allow vehicles, temporarily, to circulate again.
He said that steps are also underway to restore the drinking water service for the entire population affected by Hurricane Ian in Florida.
In relation to the number of deaths directly caused by the cyclone, the director of the Florida Division of Emergency Management, Kevin Guthrie, once again asked for time to give a definitive figure.
“There is very scattered data and we collect information from different platforms,” he added.
DeSantis said about the difficulty of giving a concrete figure as a good one that one of the problems is that many people have not responded to the contacts of the rescue teams, because they do not want to give information to the authorities.
During the first hours of this Monday, the Florida authorities reported the provisional number of 58 deaths due to the passage of Hurricane Ian.
Guthrie also noted that more than $22 million has been raised for hurricane recovery through Volunteer Florida’s Florida Disaster Fund.
Meanwhile, the donation campaigns continue for those affected and in the city of Sweetwater, in Miami-Dade County, bottled water, electric generators, gasoline cans, plywood and flashlights, among other supplies, were collected today.