Duke Energy in Florida is running a completely dishonest PR campaign.

[NutmegYankee]

4. You may be mistaking incompetance for dishonesty.

Unless you have an internet connected smart meter, the utility doesn't know if you have power back or not. Their numbers are based on estimates of the number of customers on a circuit - If they fix the circuit break they assume that everyone got power back, but there may be additional breaks. This is one of the reasons it's important for everyone to report their outage and keep following up. I would see a town go from 80% out to 20%, then within a half hour back to 50% after Irene because CL&P made that assumption on their outage map. One thing the CL&P then did up here for the Oct Snow outage was spend a lot of time driving around inspecting the lines to prevent that, which people saw and interpreted as "fucking off" and they got really enraged. (it being cold didn't help one bit)

I understand the frustration - I've spent a week without power, both in summer and fall, and a few days in winter. It's miserable.