Power has been restored to the vast majority of the millions of South Floridians and other state residents who endured a major blackout Tuesday -- a failure caused by an equipment failure in a Miami-Dade County substation, according to utility officials.
Virtually everyone in South Florida had power by 5:30 p.m. and only about 40,000 customers around the state remained in the dark -- mostly due to unrelated outages caused by a powerful cold front that is moving down the peninsula, officials said.
At its peak, the main power failure left as many as four million people without electricity in South Florida, along the Gulf Coast, in the Orlando area and elsewhere around the state, according to state officials.
The outage was caused by a switch failure at Florida Power & Light's Flagami substation -- not in the utility's nuclear plant at Turkey Point, as reported earlier by some media outlets, FPL President Armando Olivera said during an evening news conference.