All at the same time. And that would have been much worse.

Craig Fugate, the state's emergency management director, began thinking the National Guard might have to be called in. "We stood the team up," he said. "The real question is whether power was going to go back on before dark."

It did, nearly everywhere. But . . . what a day.

"We haven't had a storm in so long, I forget when was the last time that we had a power failure," said Louise Lockwood, of Cutler Bay, who got off easy. The lights only flickered in her Whispering Pines neighborhood.

Elsewhere, the blackout that began at a Florida Power & Light substation in Miami-Dade, flashed within seconds to the utility's Turkey Point nuclear plant and cascaded through much of the state plunged millions of people into darkness, confusion and -- for a few moments -- near-chaos.

It left them without air conditioning on an unusually warm day and without functioning traffic lights and elevators and most other necessities and conveniences of modern life.

"It's the nature of Florida," David Yoblick, general manager at Coconut Grove's CocoWalk shopping center, where the cash registers stopped registering cash, said of occasional blackouts. "You just deal with them."

At the outage's peak, about 475,000 of FPL's 4.4 million customers were without power, utility officials said, though the failure also affected customers of other utilities.

State officials said that nearly four million people -- a different metric than customers -- lost power around Florida.

And the blackout disrupted life in nearly every imaginable way in South Florida:

Miami-Dade schools briefly delayed regular dismissals, but buses began moving shortly after 3 p.m.

Hospitals temporarily operated on backup power, but later returned to normal operations.

At one point, Miami-Dade firefighters juggled 50 pleas for help from people stuck in elevators. "We were running all over town," Fire Chief Herminio Lorenzo said.

Brief delays were reported at Miami International Airport. The outage did not affect service at Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport, though some flights later were delayed by adverse weather conditions in the north.

As the failure struck at precisely 1:09 p.m., all but four of Miami-Dade's 2,670 traffic lights blinked off. "A massive failure," said Robert Williams, chief of the county's traffic signals division.

Police reported many traffic accidents and dispatched officers to as many intersections as possible.

By 3 p.m., 92 percent of the traffic lights were functioning as power was restored one intersection, one neighborhood at a time, though far more quickly than after Hurricane Wilma left nearly the entire region without electricity in 2005.

In Broward, the problem appeared to be limited to the southwestern suburbs, though it caused significant traffic problems there.

In Tallahassee, Fugate gazed in amazement as a giant electronic map at his operations center showed all of South Florida as well as counties in Central Florida and the Tampa Bay area shaded in red -- the sign of real trouble.

"We were baffled," Fugate said.

Miami-Dade also activated its emergency operations center shortly before 2 p.m., requiring all essential personnel to report to the Doral office. Officials there also expressed relief that the outage was ending during daylight hours.

They said an after-dark outage is far more problematic: Dark roads are infinitely more dangerous, looting becomes a concern and panic is harder to contain.

In downtown Miami and in the Brickell business district, gridlock trapped motorists, and as office towers lost air conditioning, employees streamed onto streets, filling up tables in sidewalk cafes.

Some parking garage attendants made the ultimate professional sacrifice: They raised the barricades and allowed cars to pass in and out without paying.

And in South Beach, Michael Smith, 64, soaked up the sun and waited patiently outside the Epicure Market.

"What's there to be upset about?" he asked. "We live in paradise."

Written by Miami Herald