But five days after the storm, on both the east coast of Florida and the southwest, more than 400,000 customers remained without power. There is no electricity to run the refrigerator, and people can get sick from eating spoiled food. There is no electricity to run the pumps at the bottom of wells, so there is no potable water. There is no electricity to charge up cellphone batteries, to run cash registers and A.T.M.'s and gasoline pumps. And there is no power for something as simple as a fan, to keep the heat at bay.
So Rosangel Araujo, 33, who said she had been living with her mother because her own apartment was nearly destroyed in the hurricane, cooks outside by starting fires in concrete blocks and putting pots with rice and beans on the fires.
Ms. Araujo said she had seen electrical workers in the neighborhood and she believed that they were making a good effort to restore the power. But she said, "For me it's not fast enough."
Neissa Juan, 43, said she had four children living in her house, ages 7 to 12. Two of them are nieces and nephews and two are her twin boys. And without electricity, she said, "Inside it is like an oven." She said she had been told that it would be at least a week and probably longer before her power was restored. It is not for lack of trying, utility officials say. In the days since Saturday, hundreds of thousands of customers had their power turned back on. Crews from as far away as Texas and Wisconsin, well over 10,000 people in all, work every daylight hour, and at night support personnel refuel their trucks and wash their laundry.
Electric companies have a history of territoriality, and distribution line specialists, once known as linemen, habitually refer to those from other companies as "foreign" crews. But in many areas of Florida the foreigners now outnumber the natives. Otherwise, the workload would be overwhelming.
But the damage they are discovering is overwhelming too. "It's not about repairing, about slapping wire together and splicing it," said Geisha J. Williams, vice president of distribution at the Florida Power & Light Company, said in an interview at company headquarters in Miami. "It's rebuild."
"In Punta Gorda, Port Charlotte and the Arcadia area, the damage is Andrewesque," Ms. Williams said.
Her system's 23,000-volt feeder lines each serve about 400 customers. One single feeder line lost 600 poles, she said. Normally a crew can replace two to three poles a day.
Brad Kimbro, a vice president of the Peace River Electric Cooperative, said, "What took 60 years to build was basically torn down in one afternoon." His area lost at least 1,000 utility poles. "It would take us years," he said.
So, officials say, it will be at least another three weeks before all customers have power - or at least those who have homes and businesses left
Restoration is proceeding with unusual speed. Meter readers are sent out as scouts, to accompany utility crews down streets where all the street signs have blown away. The state has helped by sending the police to run utility trucks in convoys, to get through the thickening traffic, normally bad on the gulf coast but much worse now, because there are no traffic lights in many areas.
But there are also glitches and difficulties. There is such a scarcity of hotel rooms that some crews must drive an hour and a half to their work sites, and thus lose three hours daily of their 14.5-hour workdays. At about $36 per hour of overtime, the commute costs Florida Power and Light, the state's largest electric utility, and eventually the consumers, about $100 a day, and worse, adds days to the length of the cleanup.
And that is when things go well. On two nights recently, after long days of heavy physical labor in hot, humid weather, the crews have had to spend nights sleeping in their trucks. Mr. Kimbro said his headquarters people were sleeping on air mattresses in their offices; some have homes that are partly destroyed.
And then there are other logistics for the visiting armies.
"I am serving 25,000 meals a day, delivering 25,000 gallons of drinking water a day, and 75,000 gallons of fuel a day," Ms. Williams said. The fuel moves in the kind of tanker trucks that supply gas stations.
The work goes faster on the Atlantic coast of Florida because there are more hotels there, Ms. Williams said.
Florida Power and Light, battered by storm after storm, has always had problems. Other utilities trim trees near their wires. This one cannot always do that. "How do you trim a palm tree?" Ms. Williams said.
After Hurricane Andrew, the company developed a computer simulation. Enter the storm intensity and track and it predicts what supplies will be needed.
"You don't want to order 2,000 poles if you need 3,000," she said.
("We learned after Andrew" is a mantra here, among local officials, emergency officials and utility executives.)
The work is grueling but the line technicians generally like it.
"This is what they live for, this is their big league," Ms. Williams said. "They want to go into towns and restore service. They get to be heroes."
Still, three weeks without power in humid Florida is a hazard with every day that goes by, as officials acknowledge. "It really comes down to getting electricity, as soon as possible," Tommy Thompson, the secretary of health and human services, said in Fort Myers on Tuesday.
So utilities are going an extraordinary distance, literally. Crews from Georgia and the Carolinas stayed home, fearing that Charley would hit there, but others came from the Midwest.
On Briarcliff Road here today, a neighborhood of large single-family houses, Steve Campbell, of Bloomfield, Ind., who works for Cinergy/PSI in Indiana, took a break from looking for the flaw in a cable and said, "This is the furthest that I've ever been, in 30 years.''
Mr. Campbell was impressed by the heat. But for another Indiana man, now working on the same street, Dave McCallem , a foreman at Asplundh, a tree-trimming company, it was the snakes that he was worried about. He said he spent his first night here sleeping on top of his truck, to keep away from them. "And I've never been chased by alligators before,'' he said.
The Cinergy group, 125 in all, at least had trucks with air-conditioning. The Asplundh trucks did not. The workers predicted they would not be going home for another two to three weeks. F.P.&L. said today that it expected to have all customers back by Aug. 29, but some of Florida's other companies and electric co-ops may take longer.
Both crews were dispatched from the parking lot of a defunct shopping mall in Fort Myers. F.P.&L. had brought in a mobile command post with three satellite dishes. Nearby, a dining room was set up in a giant tent.
