Gov. Ron DeSantis is back on the campaign trail, and as evidenced by a recent "tele-town hall" with supporters, the state's response to Hurricane Idalia is part of his 2024 pitch.
In the call, DeSantis took credit specifically for power restoration, contending that other states have more power outages than Florida as part of the "appropriate and overwhelming" response his administration delivered after the Big Bend storm.
"If you look at power throughout the country, there are a handful of states that have more people without power than we do," DeSantis said. "And we are basically eight days after the hurricane left the state of Florida."
It's unclear at this writing Monday afternoon which states are part of that "handful." According to PowerOutage.US, Florida has more than 9,300 accounts without power currently. California, with more than 7,300 out, is in second place.
Florida's post-Idalia outages were resolved as of Sept. 8. The number of reported outages at one time peaked at 288,000 at 3 p.m. Aug. 30. Altogether, more than 568,000 power reconnections occurred since the storm first hit the state's Gulf Coast last Wednesday.
DeSantis extolled the pace of restoration after the storm.
"This has probably been the fastest restoration, even faster than we did during Hurricane Ian," he said. "The co-ops here locally are working with Duke (Energy), the municipals, Florida Power & Light, (Tampa Electric) and every utility provider in the state, pretty much, to get those homes up and running as soon as possible."
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Jesse Scheckner of Florida Politics contributed to this report.
