Islandwide blackout hits Puerto Rico

‘It’s like the first day of Maria all over again’

An islandwide blackout hit Puerto Rico on Wednesday after an excavator accidentally downed a transmission line, officials said, as the U.S. territory struggles to repair an increasingly unstable power grid nearly seven months after Hurricane Maria.

Officials said it could take 24 to 36 hours to fully restore power to more than 1.4 million customers as outrage grew across the island about the state of Puerto Rico’s Electric Power Authority. It was the second major outage in less than a week, with the previous one affecting some 840,000 customers.

“This is too much,” said Luis Oscar Rivera, a computer technician who just got normal power back at his house less than two months ago. “It’s like the first day of Maria all over again.”

Several large power outages have hit Puerto Rico in recent months, but Wednesday was the first time since the hurricane struck on Sept. 20 that the U.S. territory has experienced a full islandwide blackout.

The outage snarled traffic across the island, interrupted classes and work, and forced dozens of businesses to temporarily close.

The new blackout occurred as Puerto Rico legislators debate a bill that would privatize the island’s power company, which is $14 billion (U.S.) in debt and relies on infrastructure nearly three times older than the industry average.