Significant progress has been made in getting power restored both in Florida and Puerto Rico on Wednesday.

As of 2:15 am Friday, 10/7., there are 142,844 customers without power in Florida in the wake of Hurricane Ian. 85% of the outages are concentrated in 2 counties – Charlotte and Lee (Fort Myers area). More than 44,000 workers from 33 states and Washington, D.C., have traveled to Florida to help restore electricity.

Over 12,000 workers were committed to help with power restoration in South Carolina, North Carolina and Virginia, where power was restored to most homes within 48 hours.

Three weeks after Hurricane Fiona, 74,709 customers were still without power in Puerto Rico out of 1,468,223 total customers. That’s 5.0% of the island. The outages are mostly on the west side of the island. One problem here is that utility trucks can’t drive to Puerto Rico over the ocean, so it takes longer to restore power after a major event like a hurricane in Puerto Rico. (image above from poweroutage.us).

The winds from Hurricane Fiona were not nearly as strong as with Hurricane Maria (which hit the island in 2017), but rainfall was catastrophic, with a few spots getting 30 inches, partly due to the slow movement of the storm.

At San Juan, the peak with gust with Fiona was 56 mph. The peak wind gust from Hurricane Maria in 2017 at San Juan was 113 mph.

They had 4,10″ of rain on Sept. 18 and 7.14″ of rain in three days from the 17th to the 19th. This is the “rainy season” in Puerto Rico. The last day with no rainfall in San Juan was August 13th. They have had 12.58″ of rain this month. The rain doesn’t cool things off much – the coolest temperature so far this Sept. in San Juan has been 75.

The table above shows the highest rainfall totals form hurricanes in Puerto Rico. Rainfall from Fiona was extremely large, but not unprecedented. You can see the record rainfall from a hurricane occurred 52 years ago and was 41.68″.