San Juan, Puerto Rico — A massive power outage hit almost all of Puerto Rico early Tuesday as the U.S. territory prepared to celebrate New Year’s Eve. More than 1.2 million out of 1.47 million customers were without power, according to Luma Energy, a private company that oversees the transmission and distribution of electricity on the island.
Lumia said in a statement As of Tuesday morning, it would likely take between 24 and 48 hours to restore power to the entire island, “conditions permitting,” but a few hours later service had been restored to some areas, without providing an update on the total number of customers concerned. .
The company said a medical center and the San Juan Municipal Hospital were back operational and that it would provide additional updates on the restoration of service islandwide every two hours.
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“While the cause of the outage remains under investigation, preliminary findings indicate an outage in an underground line,” Luma said in an earlier statement.
As of 3 p.m., about 73,000 customers “were currently in service,” the company said in a statement. social media update. Facilities, including hospitals and water and sewer facilities, are “under stress,” Luma said.
Reuters cited Ivan Baez, a spokesman for Puerto Rico’s primary energy producer Genera, as saying the grid outage was believed to have been caused by a problem with a line operated by Luma, but that it also caused the breakdown of power plants owned by Genera and certain other private electricity producers.
Puerto Rico Governor Pedro Pierluisi said in a statement post on social media that his administration was communicating with Luma and Genera “regarding the massive power outage affecting much of the island due to a critical outage.”
He indicated that work was underway to restore electricity supply and that the government “demanded answers and solutions from Luma and Genera, which must accelerate the restart of generators outside the outage zone and keep the population duly informed of the measures they take. to restore service throughout the island.
However, speaking to the Telemundo network on Monday evening, Josué Colón, head of Puerto Rico’s electric power authority, I said it could take several days to fully restore service.
Puerto Rico continues to face chronic power outages blamed on a crumbling power grid that has been razed by Hurricane Mariaa powerful Category 4 storm that hit the island in September 2017. The system was already in decline before the storm due to years of lack of maintenance and investment.
In a social media post Tuesday, former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, whose state has one of the largest populations of Puerto Ricans in the continental United States, said residents of the territory had been “treated as second-class citizens for far too long”. “.
“The fact that as Americans they lack a reliable power grid and experience sporadic and ongoing power outages is indefensible and would not be tolerated anywhere else in the United States.” says Cuomo. “The federal government must finally recognize its responsibility to Puerto Rico and provide the resources and expertise needed to end this cycle of madness once and for all.”
