HERNANDO COUNTY, Fla. — Two Hernando County schools will be closed on Monday, the district posted on Facebook Sunday night.
Hernando High School and Brooksville Elementary School will be closed on Monday "out of an abundance of caution," according to the post.
Hernando County Schools said the closure was due to "a rolling outage scheduled by Duke Energy," but Duke said, "there were no plans to implement rotating outages."
Duke issued a full statement below:
"Duke Energy Florida encouraged our customers to conserve power this morning. There were no plans to implement rotating outages and no rotating outages occurred. Florida’s grid is interconnected among all the utilities across the state. By maximizing the amount of electricity available on the grid we can not only serve our Duke Energy Florida customers, but also share with neighboring utilities who may need additional power.
Duke Energy offers a variety of voluntary programs which can help during times of high demand. Those programs provide credits or even reduced rates to our customers. Again, these are voluntary programs customers enroll in, to receive credits or a reduced rate. We asked enrolled customers to be prepared. Customers who signed up for specific programs were notified. This does not apply to the general Duke Energy Florida customer population. The message below was the appropriate message shared for Duke Energy Florida customers."
Tampa Bay 28 reached out to the Hernando County School District and received the following statement:
"The district was informed by Duke Energy last night that they would have to interrupt service starting at 5 a.m. until 9 a.m. this morning. Thus, we decided it was in the best interest of the safety and well-being of students and staff to close the campuses which were impacted and delay staff arrival until 10 a.m., when power would be purportedly restored.
We received additional guidance from Duke Energy this morning that no services were interrupted, but the possibility of disruption still extended until 9 a.m."
All other district campuses will remain open.
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