Letter from Managing Director and CEO

A Letter to Customers from Vickie Cavey, Interim Managing Director and CEO

November 5, 2024

Dear Valued JEA Customer,

This hurricane season has been a challenging time for our friends and family across Florida, as many areas continue to recover from recent storms’ devastating impacts. While our thoughts and prayers are with those who are still struggling to resume normalcy, I want to take a moment to share some insights into JEA’s preparations and the response by our 2,200 team members.  

Every storm is different, and we work to learn and improve from each event. Our dedicated line workers restored power to 90 percent of impacted customers within 24 hours after Hurricane Helene, when high winds initially sidelined our crews for several hours. Hurricane Milton’s winds were not as high and we avoided severe impacts, allowing us to restore 90 percent of impacted customers within hours.

While we dodged a direct impact from both storms, any time we experience severe weather in Northeast Florida, outages are likely to occur due to damage from fallen trees and branches and flooding in low-lying areas. I’m grateful for our preparations and the expertise of our water and wastewater teams, as we did not experience any sanitary sewer overflows or water outages during either storm. They kept JEA’s plants and systems up and running in some difficult conditions.

We prepare year-round for storms, investing in our infrastructure, upgrading technology, trimming trees and training our team members. From our leadership team, operations, call center staff, outreach teams – everyone at JEA works together to support our front lines to best serve our customers.  

Part of our planning involves ensuring we have additional electric and vegetation/tree crews in advance of storms to supplement our existing crews and minimize our response time. We appreciate all the outside crew members who left their families, many for extended periods, to support JEA customers. 

And we were honored to be able to assist our fellow Floridians as well. Once our customers’ services were all restored, JEA was able to deploy electric and water crews to hard-hit areas that needed support to restore their own communities. This recent period illustrated how committed municipal utilities are to not only taking care of their own communities, but others as well. If we need them in the future, we know they’ll be there for us. 

We are proud of our team and extremely grateful to serve you and this community. 

Remember, hurricane season runs through Nov. 30. In fact, we’re watching a new storm, Rafael, which is expected to strengthen into a hurricane tonight in the Gulf. While we don’t expect direct impacts from it, there is a chance Rafael will bring excessive rainfall to our area the next two days. These late-season storms underscore the need to remain vigilant and stay prepared. Visit jea.com/storm and jaxready.com and download the JaxReady app for important tips and updates.

Above all, stay safe. We want all of our customers to remain JaxReady.

Sincerely, 

Vickie Cavey