Transmission Structures News Today

im john berman in ft. myers, florida, and the storm has intensified again. 85-mile-per-hour winds, heading towards the carolinas. this after tearing the destructive path across florida. it is expected to make landfall in south carolina around midday, somewhere between charleston and myrtle beach. it could produce life-threatening floods there in the carolinas. this is already liskely the largest natural disaster in floridas history. im standing in the middle of some of the damage, in a...

i was on the police department for 25 years, saw a lot of storms here. this is by far the worst storm i have ever witnessed. >> i promise you, im never going to sit through another storm ever again here. i am one of the lucky ones. >> just some of the survivors of hurricane ian after the storm decimated wide sections of florida, and now the storm is on track to make a second u.s. landfall threatening the carolinas and georgia. good morning, and welcome to "morning joe," it is friday, s...

>> well, in areas that you physically cant get to and cant get to quickly that could be flooded, we put drone teams up where we use artificial intelligence and camera technology on the drone and it tells us where stations might be flooded and it tells us what supplies were going to need to be ready when we can get into the area and restore power. one of the silver linings in the first 48 hour was the fact that our transmission grid held up in the west counties. we did not have a single transmiss...

>> good morning, mika. since the start to have the storm, we have more than 2 million fpl customers in power outages. we have been able to restore over a million of those already. that does mean, however, that we still have one million customers without power. thats predominantly on the west coast of the state, thats where weve seen the biggest effect from the storm. >> are there areas that the infrastructure itself has been destroyed and whats the time line on that? >> absolutely. so the good n...

Certain areas. were challenged by some flood waters still in place, challenged by traffic and other things. we have resources in our territory to respond and restore power, but we have a set of expectations. this is still manually a labor-intensive process. were encouraged by some of what were seeing. the investments weve put in over the last decade, about $3 billion worth is actually yielding results in what we think of faster restoration. by that i mean were not seeing the poles down we antici...

Sides of cores during the restoration. the west side, we expect to have the vast majority of customers essentially all restored by friday the 22nd. we are seeing some encouraging things. i will tell you straight up that much of our investments in the system seems to be paying benefits on behalf of customers. we are not seeing a lot of poles down, not saying the transmission structures down. these are wood structures we changed to concrete and steel. they are standing strong. we are seeing a lot ...

30% performance better than non-hardened features. where we have concrete poles and in place of wood poles. they held. we are not seeing any transmission structures. thats the backbone of our infrastructure. the interstate highway of energy. we have not seen any of those structures come down. that is very good news for the customers. >> would you say next friday, i want to be specific. you mean a week from this friday, 10 or 11 days, is that right? >> thats correct. we are talking about a 10-day...