Crews scrambled to revive power to Puerto Rico on Thursday after a blackout hit the whole island, affecting the essential international airport, hospitals and hotels full of Easter vacationers.
The outage that began past noon Wednesday left 1.4 million customers without electricity and greater than 400,000 without water. Greater than 826,600 customers, or 56 per cent, had power back by Thursday afternoon, while 83 per cent of consumers had water restored. Officials expected 90 per cent of consumers to have power back inside 48 to 72 hours after the outage.
“It is a shame for the people of Puerto Rico that we now have an issue of this magnitude,” said Gov. Jenniffer González, who cut her weeklong vacation short and returned to Puerto Rico on Wednesday evening.
She said it might take at the very least three days to have preliminary information on what might need caused the blackout, which snarled traffic, forced a whole lot of companies to shut and left those unable to afford generators scrambling to purchase ice and candles.
“There’s still an extended road of recovery,” she said. “Our system could be very fragile.”
It’s the second massive blackout to hit Puerto Rico in lower than 4 months, with the previous one occurring on Latest Yr’s Eve.
Government under pressure to cancel energy firm contracts
“Why on holidays?” griped José Luis Richardson, who didn’t have a generator and kept cool by splashing water on himself every couple of hours.
The roar of generators and smell of fumes filled the air as a growing variety of Puerto Ricans renewed calls for the federal government to cancel the contracts with Luma Energy, which oversees the transmission and distribution of power, and Genera PR, which oversees generation.
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González promised to heed those calls.
“That is just not under doubt or query,” she said, but added that it’s not a fast process. “It’s unacceptable that we now have failures of this type.”
González said a serious outage just like the one which occurred Wednesday results in an estimated US$230 million revenue loss every day.
Ramón C. Barquín III, president of the United Retail Center, a nonprofit that represents small- and medium-sized businesses, warned that ongoing outages would spook potential investors at a time when Puerto Rico urgently needs economic development.
“We cannot proceed to repeat this cycle of blackouts without taking concrete measures to strengthen our energy infrastructure,” he said.
Many also were concerned about Puerto Rico’s elderly population, with the mayor of Canóvanas deploying brigades to go to the bedridden and people who rely on electronic medical equipment.
Meanwhile, the mayor of Vega Alta opened a middle to offer power to those with lifesaving medical equipment.
Wednesday night was difficult for a lot of, including 62-year-old Santos Bones Burgos.
“I spent it on the balcony,” he said, adding that he was attempting to get some fresh air.
In some unspecified time in the future, he fell asleep and recalled waking up at 5 a.m. to a neighbor yelling, “The ability is back!”
Amongst those unable to sleep was Dorca Navarrete, a 50-year-old house cleaner who said it was too hot.
“Last night was horrible,” she said. “I woke up with a headache.”
When she opened her eyes, she saw light and thought it couldn’t possibly be the sun at that hour. Then a smile spread across her face when she realized it was from the sunshine she had left on in a room the day before.
What caused the blackout?
It was not immediately clear what caused the shutdown, the most recent in a string of major blackouts on the island lately.
One possibility is that overgrown vegetation affected the grid, which, if true, mustn’t have happened, said Josué Colón, the island’s energy czar and former executive director of Puerto Rico’s Electric Power Authority.
He noted that the authority flew every day to examine on certain lines, something he said Luma must be doing.
Colón said Luma also needs to clarify why all of the generators shut down after there was a failure within the transmission system, when just one was purported to go into protective mode.
Pedro Meléndez, a Luma engineer, said an investigation is ongoing. He said in a press conference Thursday that he didn’t immediately have details on when the corporate last did an air patrol, but said those occur with the frequency established in its contract.
Daniel Hernández, vice chairman of operations at Genera PR, said Wednesday that a disturbance hit the transmission system shortly after noon, a time when the grid is vulnerable because there are few machines regulating frequency at that hour.
Puerto Rico has struggled with chronic outages since September 2017, when Hurricane Maria pummeled the island as a strong Category 4 storm, razing an influence grid that crews are still struggling to rebuild.
The grid already had been deteriorating because of this of a long time of an absence of maintenance and investment under the state’s Electric Power Authority, which is struggling to restructure $9 billion in debt.
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