Breaking: Blackout in South Florida

Power outages are cascading through many parts of South Florida, with Florida Power & Light and others reporting blackouts in portions of Miami, Doral, Westchester, Pembroke Pines, Miramar and Boca Raton.

Many traffic lights are not working and nine accidents were reported in Miami-Dade County between 1:04 p.m. and 1:26 p.m. Police agencies were dispatching officers to as many intersections as possible.

The lights flickered off at several South Florida hospitals, which had to switch to generator power.

"We had a blip here and the generators kicked in immediately," Jackson Memorial Hospital spokeswoman Lorraine Nelson said.

Mount Sinai Medical Center in Miami Beach and Baptist Hospital in Southwest Miami-Dade reported similar situations.

A spokeswoman for FPL said the company was investigating the extent and cause of the problem.

In one part of western Pembroke Pines, the outage began about 1:15 p.m., but service was restored within about 10 minutes.

Reuters is reporting that several power plants went offline.

I'd be curious to hear why this happened. With tonight's debate just hours away, expect someone to raise this as a question on energy policy, even though Congress has not allowed utilities to build new nuclear power plants by loosening restrictions, and the energy infrastructure in the country remains creaky at best despite a massive blackout in the Northeast several years ago and ongoing problems with energy distribution.

UPDATE:
One of the power plants that went offline includes a nuclear reactor, which apparently went offline when it lost power from an outside source.

A spokeswoman for FPL Group Inc said the company's Turkey Point nuclear reactor in Florida shut down due to the loss of off-site power but would not elaborate on the cause of the outage.

Mike Stone, a spokesman for the Florida Division of Emergency Management, said the blackout affected two to three million people in south Florida and as far north as the Tampa area of the state.

Local media said the number of those affected was higher.

"I don't know the cause of the outage," Stone told Reuters, saying authorities were awaiting an update from FPL.

"There was a failure within the FPL system," Stone said.

They're quick to mention that terrorism isn't suspected as a source, even as no one quite knows how or why it happened.

UPDATE:
The blackout could continue into the night, and they're not sure if the instability in the grid is due to the shutdown of the Turkey Point nuclear power plant or whether it is a symptom of the problem. However, one has to wonder why the utility isn't responding to some media queries - that's just bad public relations on their part.

Florida's largest electric company shut down a nuclear reactor south of Miami for safety reasons Tuesday, causing sporadic power outages covering large portions of the state that could last well into the night. More than 3 million people are affected, the state says.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission said that the two Florida Power & Light nuclear reactors at its Turkey Point power point 30 miles south of Miami automatically shut down. Two other power plants farther north, the Crystal River reactor and St. Lucie twin reactors, in the state continued to operate, although officials at those two facilities noticed the grid disturbance.

"We don't know whether the grid disturbance caused the units to shut down or that their shut down caused the grid disturbance," said Kenneth Clark, a spokesman at the NRC regional office in Atlanta. He said the two reactors were automatically shut down and in safe standby.

"There are no safety concerns. The reactors shut down as designed," said Clark in a telephone interview. He said both reactor continued to have offsite electric power. He said two coal-burning power plants at Turkey Point also shut down.

FPL in several media interviews estimated that power should be up statewide within 10 hours. The company did not return repeated calls from The Associated Press or speak to a reporter in the lobby of its Juno Beach headquarters.

UPDATE:
Well, it appears that a problem at a nearby power substation caused Turkey Point to shut down, and the problem spread to seven other power plants, causing a widespread blackout across Florida.