More than 20,000 TECO customers between Tampa and Winter Haven are in the dark tonight while Tropical Storm Debby continues to batter the region.

“This is more than we’ve had all day,” TECO spokeswoman Lynn Pushman said of the number of customers affected tonight. “One circuit after another went down. We have people on site working as quickly and as safely as possible.”

About 12,000 of those customers are in the Bay Area alone.

The public utility’s outage map is heavily marked with dots, each one signifying a different problem site. Pushman said TECO hopes most of the Tampa area neighborhoods will have power restored by 1 a.m. or 2 a.m. — but the number of affected customers is great.

“There are quite a lot of them right now,” she said. 

Stay with Patch for updates on the storm and the outages.