Huge Power Outage Strikes Fla.

Power outages concentrated in the Miami area struck across Florida just after 1 this afternoon, the Miami Herald reports. The lights started coming back on within 2 hours, but the cause of the blackout still wasn't known. Both nuclear reactors at the Turkey Point plant south of Miami automatically shut down, blacking out hundreds of thousands of customers, "but we do not know why at this point," said an NRC spokesman.

Florida Power & Light estimated 4.4 million customers in South Florida were in the dark on an unseasonably warm day, CNN reports. A spokeswoman said the company was "getting people back in a systematic way and getting them back into the grid." The power failures extended north nearly to Jacksonville on the Atlantic coast and as far up the Gulf coast as Tampa. (More Florida stories.)