Hurricane Irma has knocked out power to about 7.3 million homes and businesses in the US Southeast, mostly in Florida, according to state officials and local electric utilities.
Irma hit southwest Florida on Sunday morning as a dangerous Category 4 hurricane, the second-highest level on the five-step Saffir-Simpson scale. It had weakened to a tropical storm by Monday morning (local time) as it headed toward Georgia.
The storm, which was moving into southern Georgia, was packing maximum sustained winds of 97 km/h, according to the US National Hurricane Center on Monday.
Power losses in Georgia, which were nearing 900,000, were expected to increase as the storm moved north.
In Florida, the state's biggest electric company said its outages dipped to 3.5 million from a peak of 3.6 million earlier on Monday. A total of almost 4.5 million Florida Power & Light customers have been affected by the storm, with about 1 million getting service restored, mostly by automated devices.
"We've never had that many outages, and I don't think any utility in the country ever has," FPL Chief Executive Eric Silagy said at a news conference on Monday. "It is by far and away the largest in the history of our company."
FPL said it was still assessing the damage and could not yet say when it would restore service to most customers. Some homes and businesses could be without power for weeks, especially in the hardest-hit areas like southwest Florida, the NextEra Energy Inc unit said.
As the storm pushed north, outage figures were increasing at other large utilities, including units of Duke Energy Corp , Southern Co and Emera Inc.
As Irma loomed and came ashore, gasoline stations struggled to keep up as people evacuated Florida. In the Atlanta metropolitan area, about 545 stations, or about 13.2 per cent of the total, were out of the fuel earlier on Monday, according to information service Gas Buddy.
Irma is expected to sap demand for fuel for a time, Goldman Sachs analysts said in a note on Monday, but they cautioned that supply could remain strained because of refining capacity offline after Hurricane Harvey, which hit Texas two weeks ago.
