Already, the company has restored 1 million connections, though some only temporarily.

On Sunday, the utility’s VP of communications, Rob Gould, told ABC that residents on the east coast could expect a standard post-storm restoration timeline, but that the west coast’s electrical grid would need a “wholesale rebuild.”

“This is going to be a very, very lengthy restoration, arguably the longest and most complex in U.S. history,” Gould said.

That task will begin very soon. The company plans to have 16,000 people, including thousands from other utilities, working out on the lines.

The restoration of power to western Florida will be a test of the resilience of Florida Light and Power’s vaunted smart-grid infrastructure. The utility says it has invested over $3 billion in making its grid “stronger, smarter, and more storm-resilient.”

It was standing with FPL’s CEO that President Obama announced $3.4 billion in smart-grid grants through the Department of Energy as part of the stimulus package, and when the utility finished its smart-grid installation in 2013, it was lauded as smart-grid technology’s coming-of-age moment.

All the investment appeared to pay off last year during hurricanes Hermine and Matthew. All the fancy new gear prevented some outages and helped the utility get things back running quickly.The Edison Electric Institute, a utility-industry trade group, gave FPL two awards earlier this year for "Emergency Recovery" and "Emergency Assistance" because of its performance during the 2016 hurricanes.

In other words, FPL’s grid was about the best the country could have brought to the table. And now, apparently, Irma has laid waste to at least a large chunk of that system.

What could a “wholesale rebuild” mean?

An electric grid is a complex technical system. There are power plants that feed electricity onto the grid and there are consumer loads that take the power. In between, there is connective tissue that allows for long-distance transmission of power as well as for the local distribution of that electricity: high-voltage transmission lines, substations, transformers, and regular local power lines.

Generally speaking, power outages usually happen toward the edges of the network, when local power lines get snapped or their poles are felled.

FPL’s statement indicates that the west-coast grid has sustained damage beyond the standard downed power lines. Pieces of the system’s core have been compromised. However, given how early they are in the effort to bring power back, they haven’t had a chance to inspect all their facilities.

“We haven’t seen structural damage,” the utility’s president Silagy said Monday morning, “but I am sure we will see some.”

This happened to several utilities during Hurricane Sandy in 2013—which, until today, had caused more people to lose power than any other in history. In a deep postmortem, Greentech Media detailed some of the carnage inflicted on one utility, Public Service Enterprise Group. Sandy had damaged 16 substations, one-third of its transmission circuits, multiple power plants, and thousands of distribution lines and poles. Two million of their 2.2 million customers lost service.