TAMPA, Fla. — Tampa Electric wants you to know it's ready for hurricane season, which begins Saturday.
When hurricane Irma hit two years ago, 425,000 Tampa homes lost power.
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TECO says it's constantly at work to speed up the process of restoring power.
It starts in the distribution control room, where reports of power outages come in.
“We can pinpoint power outages down to the address. We get communication from the customers and our field personnel that are working out there," said TECO manager Ed Mora.
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TECO says it’s improving that process with plans to install smart meters that will let them know automatically when a customer loses power.
They are also using drones to asses damage and make upgrades on key power lines. Before this hurricane season, TECO trimmed almost 1,200 miles of trees around power lines.
When it comes to making those repairs out in the field, TECO uses an all-terrain vehicle called ARGO to get to those hard to reach areas.
TECO says to make sure your contact information is correct in it’s system which you can do on it’s website here.
You can even let TECO know about an outage by texting OUT to 35069*.
TECO’s website’s also has an outage map.
“If you have evacuated in severe weather and you want to see if the power is back on out your house you can type your address and it will tell you if your power is functioning or it remains out," said spokesperson Cherie Jacobs.
