Just flipping through the news sources in TX... there's still 114,000 "customers" or ~228,000 people (assuming they're calling 1 meter = 1 customer) without power after 18 days?

Jeesh. I had heard early on from a visiting lineman who was out in the area say power restoration efforts were a total mess. Maps of the grid were difficult to get ahold of and wildly inaccurate/outdated when they did get ahold of them.

Does anyone have insider info on what's taking so long with restoring over there? Did the power co's not maintain their infrastructure (similar to FP&L's 40+ year old power poles & Hurricane Wilma)? or was it just not built to handle it at all? Or are the power cos out there really as inept as the lineman told me?

To give Florida Power & Light some credit, after all of the hurricanes I've seen in recent times, the barrier islands usually had power back within a week, city usually even sooner, with a few isolated cases of people not getting power back for ~10-14 days. That said, I did get to work with many visiting power crews, mainly guiding them to substations that needed repair, and a few of them had grumbled that things here weren't done as well as they could have been...and they were going to "do it right this time."