Hurricane Frances from Ground Zero

[Hateful]

Hi everybody............I just joined.We are in West Palm Beach,Florida and we got hit hard.I am at my parents' house,who were lucky enough to get their power back yesterday.My husband and I are still without power,water or phone service at our place.Trees are everywhere and there is little or no gas to be had.The food situation is even worse.
To top off all this good news,FPL and Bellsouth have no estimated time of repair for us,so we could be without water,power or a telephone for several monthes.
Anyone else have any reports from ground zero?how are you coping?we are seriously losing it here.

[Deenac813]

First of all, I want to say I am really sorry and hope you are doing better. Second of all, I want to say thank you for giving me a new perspective. I was just getting really depressed about not having power back until Friday of this week and now you say it might be MONTHS? UGH! I am so sorry for you and I will quit feeling sorry for myself! Thanks and good luck.

[MBryant]

Barring a visit (heaven forbid) from Ivan, most electricity and phone service should be restored in from a few days to two weeks. The more neighbors you have, the sooner you'll have service restored.

I base this on years of service with various utility companys, including some time with FP&L as a contractor. Utilities have a great restoration plan to get back service. (they're not actually sympathetic as much as they don't make money while you're power is off).
There are crews from all over the region ready to help with restoration and it will take about 2-3 days before estimates will be available.

They have to walk all the circuits first to see what is needed to restore service so they can prioritize efforts. The Transmission circuits get first priority and the distribution circuits for emergency services are first restored. After that, the easiest fixes that restore the most customers begin.

Take care to avoid the power lines when removing fallen trees and limbs. I saw an entire subdivision get their service restored after a 16 day outage only to have it taken out of service within 60 seconds because someone trimmed a tree onto a circuit. Took another day to restore their service.

By the way, don't be surprised if the crews go to a daylight hours only schedule since they all need rest and daylight is a safer working environment.

Good luck!