(Reuters) – More than 830,000 homes and businesses in the U.S. Southeast were without power on Thursday, according to local power companies, as the remnants of Hurricane Michael headed northeast into the Carolinas after battering the Florida Panhandle.
That is down from over 850,000 customers affected by Michael as utilities in Florida and Alabama restored service while the number of outages continued to grow in the Carolinas as the storm moved northeast.
Michael, the third most powerful storm ever to strike the U.S. mainland, weakened into a tropical storm over South Carolina. It made landfall Wednesday afternoon as a Category 4 hurricane on the five-step Saffir-Simpson scale with maximum sustained winds of 155 miles (249 km) per hour.
Reporting by Harshith Aranya and Sumita Layek in Bengaluru and Scott DiSavino in New York; Editing by Jason Neely and Jeffrey Benkoe