FPL fails Bradenton after Irma; workers deserve thanks, leaders should be fired

Florida Power and Light’s performance during and after IRMA has been and is unacceptable.

Despite claims of being prepared for major hurricane damage, they clearly were not. It is possible that they did arrange for line crews and trucks to stage locally or close-by. But they did not arrange or stage anywhere near the necessary spare parts and support equipment to handle the damage for the smaller storm we endured, let alone a larger storm.

They also made it extremely difficult to contact them. Their web site offered useless information and no contact tool. Their automated telephone response system was useless and designed as a poor public relations system. While my community was only 43 hours without electric, there are communities now entering nine days without electric.

FPL line crews and worker-bees deserve our thanks. FPL leadership need to be terminated in some cases and extensively retrained in all cases. There is no acceptable reason FPL could not have told every community a reasonable estimate of when service would return. A tiered response does not have to be sequential. One team could be assigned to run down the less than 50 house outages, while other teams handle the commercial and large community outages.

Medical and safety facilities are important, businesses are important (although they do not vote), but people are most important (they do vote). Priorities are tough, but that is why government has an emergency process and center.

From this end-user's view point, FPL in Bradenton and Sarasota provided our respective governments and citizens with insufficient and unacceptable leadership. When thank you's and appreciation certificates are distributed for jobs well done, I hope FPL is not given any recognition.

This story was originally published September 18, 2017 at 12:10 PM with the headline "FPL fails Bradenton after Irma; workers deserve thanks, leaders should be fired."