Utility crews work overtime to prepare for Hurricane Irma

OSCEOLA COUNTY, Fla. — Crews from across Central Florida are fueling up and stocking supplies ahead of the Hurricane Irma.

One of the big concerns is falling trees, so utility crews need to prepare for “after” the storm and workers had to go pretty far to find some extra help.

The standby crews are as far away as Wisconsin and Minnesota.

Whether they're actually needed will depend on what Irma may do to Florida.

“We get about 72 hours out from the storm, and we start prepping vehicles and going through our inventory, and checking equipment and testing things just before the storm,” said Kissimmee Utility Authority spokesperson Chris Gent.

Watch: 9 Ways to Prepare Your Home for Hurricane Season

A spokesperson said KUA has been working to upgrade its equipment since the storms of 2004--hardening about 70 percent of its systems.

“By hardening, I mean replacing poles. We had a lot of wood poles that we replaced with spun concrete and steel poles, so they can take a lot higher wind resistance than a wooden pole,” said Gent.

The utility lines seem to fade into the trees near some neighborhoods around Kissimmee, which caused issues in 2004.

“We had a little bit of a problem. We were out for about two or three days,” said resident John Chapin.

Chapin knows what it’s like to survive a storm without power.

Crews are preparing equipment to make sure that doesn’t happen, but Gent said underground power lines won’t necessarily save you from an outage.

“We get enough rain, the root of the system pulls up and the trees go over, and they pull the underground power lines with them,” he said.

KUA said repairing underground lines can take longer because it’s more difficult to find the problem, so it will all depend on how much rain and wind the storm brings.

One of the other challenges with Irma is finding extra help.

KUA said most Florida utility companies don't have workers to spare because they're also in Irma's cone, while others went to Houston to help with Hurricane Harvey.

Kissimmee has identified about 150 linemen and tree trimmers from Wisconsin, Minnesota and Ohio who could be called down to Central Florida.

“We'll probably make a decision by end of business tomorrow,” Gent said.

Cox Media Group