Officials from Pacific Gas & Electric Company (PG&E) say more than a dozen PG&E workers from the Central Coast are assisting with cleanup efforts after Hurricane Milton devastated parts of Florida last week.
Crews from San Luis Obispo and Santa Barbara counties are replacing broken power poles and installing new transformers and powerlines— the same kind of work they do in California after storms and fires— according to PG&E.
Nate Alexander, a PG&E subforeman based in Templeton, is part of the crew that has been in Florida since Oct. 4.
“This hurricane response has been a unique perspective because usually in California, we have fires and drought and maybe some rainstorms,” Alexander said in a press release. “But the devastation we’ve seen here, the water ingress, the sheer of the tornadoes that we saw, the violence and the chaos, it’s been a new perspective for line work.”
PG&E officials say the company has been assigned assessment and restoration duties for 13 circuits serving about 27,000 customers who are without power.
“We left California a week ago, heading to Georgia to help utility customers there after Hurricane Helene,” said Bobby Severson, Incident Commander of PG&E’s deployment, in a press release. “We are now in a different state responding to the damage from a different hurricane, but our mission to safely restore power to customers who need it as a first step to getting their lives back in order remains the same.”
According to the Edison Electric Institute, PG&E’s electric workers and support staff make up just a fraction of workers on storm duty in Florida; more than 50,000 workers have traveled from at least 43 states, the District of Columbia, and Canada to help with recovery efforts.
