As the 2022 Atlantic hurricane season entered its fourth month, Florida Power & Light’s (NYSE:NEE) customers were starting to feel they could relax.

Storm activity had been unusually light, with just four named storms since the season started on June 5, and only the first — Tropical Storm Alex — directly impacted Florida. The season’s first hurricane, Danielle, didn’t form until Sept. 1, making 2022 the first season to have its first hurricane develop so late since 2013.

“The Atlantic was very quiet; a lot of folks out there … were saying they thought hurricane season may be over,” Andy Pankratz, FPL’s senior director of emergency preparedness, said at SERC Reliability’s Extreme Weather Webinar on Thursday. “We’ve got onsite meteorologists that were definitely not believing that, and to their credit [they] were giving us a heads-up that the Atlantic looked like it was going to be getting more active very soon. And that’s exactly what happened at the very beginning of September.”

Andy Pankratz, Florida Power & Light | SERC

Storm activity began to pick up after Danielle, but Hurricane Ian finally blew away the relative lull when it made landfall in southwest Florida as a Category 5 storm on Sept. 28, having already caused a nationwide power outage in Cuba. With 150-mph winds, the storm tied for the fifth-strongest hurricane ever to hit the contiguous U.S. And with 149 fatalities it was the deadliest storm to hit Florida since 1935.

Hurricanes are a fact of life for Florida’s utilities, but Ian took things to another level. Recalling that he “was around for” 2004’s Category 4 Hurricane Charley, Pankratz shared a graphic showing that the storm could have fit entirely within the eye of Ian, saying “it really put things into perspective.”

Ian cut power to more than 2 million of FPL’s customers, although recovery was rapid compared with earlier storms. As an executive from the company explained at SERC’s December board of directors meeting, two-thirds of affected customers were restored by the day after landfall, and restoration was complete within eight days. (See FPL Credits Grid Hardening for Fast Ian Restoration.)

Despite the fast recovery, Ian left weakened soil that proved a liability when Hurricane Nicole, the 14th and last named storm of the season, made landfall in November. Nicole, a Category 1 at its peak, was the third storm of 2022 to make landfall in Florida after Alex and Ian, and only the third November hurricane on record to do so. It was also the first hurricane to make landfall on Florida’s east coast since 2005’s Hurricane Katrina.

The unstable ground after Ian “really created some challenging conditions” for crews from FPL and other utilities assisting in recovery efforts, Pankratz said, and workers “had to really get creative” when entering affected areas. Their solutions included using barges to bring trucks into areas they could not access from land; one employee even used a kayak to reach a substation surrounded by floodwaters.

Pankratz said that although FPL sees its response to Ian and Nicole as “arguably … two of our best performances from a restoration perspective ever,” the utility is still looking for areas to improve.

“We have pages and pages and pages of lessons learned and things that we want to do better — and things that we’ve already implemented this year and are continuing to implement prior to storm season,” Pankratz said. “We’re really, really focused on lessons learned and getting better each and every time we have an event — or support an event.”