The death toll from Hurricane Irma was at 82 early on Friday as 1.5 million homes and businesses in Florida remained without power in sweltering heat, five days after the historic storm ripped through southeast US
NextEra Energy Inc’s (NEE.N) FPL, Florida’s biggest electric company, said on Friday about 1.1 million customers had no power, while Duke Energy Corp (DUK.N) reported that more than 371,000 customers were in the dark and Tampa Electric, a unit of Emera Inc (EMA.TO), reported about 39,000 were without power, Reuters reported.
Irma, which had ranked as one of the most powerful Atlantic storms on record before striking the US mainland as a Category 4 hurricane on Sunday, has been blamed for at least 82 deaths, with several hard-hit Caribbean islands, including Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands, accounting for more than half the fatalities.
At least 32 deaths have been reported in Florida and seven more combined in Georgia and South Carolina. The death toll includes eight elderly patients who died after being exposed to sweltering heat inside a Miami-area nursing home left with little or no air conditioning after the hurricane struck.
The deaths at the Rehabilitation Center at Hollywood Hills stirred outrage at what many saw as a preventable tragedy, and heightened concerns about the vulnerability of the state’s large elderly population amid widespread, lingering power outages.
