Few power outages in Florida reported so far from Nicole. But numbers expected to rise

By Wednesday night, with Hurricane Nicole still offshore from Florida’s eastern seaboard, power outages had increased a bit — but for the most part, Floridians were still able to watch television and cook meals.

From Monroe County to the south, to Nassau County at the Georgia line, a little over 12,000 customers on the state’s east coast had lost power, according to the Internet site PowerOutage.us. The site gathers power outage data from utilities across the country.

Florida Power & Light, the state’s largest provider of electricity, said 5,160 of its customers were powerless, a drop of about 4,000 outages from earlier in the day.

Nicole’s winds remained at about 75 miles per hour at about 7 p.m., according to the National Hurricane Center. The storm made landfall in the Bahamas and was just a few hours from striking somewhere near the Palm Beach and Martin County line, about two hours north of Miami.

The hardest-hit county, according to the PowerOutage Internet site, was Palm Beach County, where 4,120 customers had lost power. Indian River was also experiencing quite a few outages with 2,090 customers without power. Outages otherwise were fairly minimal.

FPL said that 1,230 customers had lost power in Miami-Dade County. About 830 customers had lost power in Palm Beach County, according to the utility giant. And only 630 customers in Broward were powerless.

FPL has about 4 million customers in the 13 counties along the state’s eastern seaboard. The numbers from FPL vary slightly from those aggregated from the internet site PowerOutage.us, which gathers power outage data from utilities across the country.

FPL Spokesman Jack Eble said customers can expect the numbers to increase as Nicole’s massive wind field makes its way to Florida. He said the utility has 13,000 workers ready at 11 staging areas across the state. While Eble wouldn’t go as far as saying it was about an average day for FPL — so far — he did say, the numbers were “quite low at this time.”

“We’re ready to respond to customers as the storm approaches,” he said.