One million still without power in Puerto Rico
Hurricane Fiona hit island at weekend
New York – An estimated 1million homes and businesses remained without power in Puerto Rico yesterday morning after Hurricane Fiona hit on Sunday, causing an islandwide power outage for its roughly 3.3-million people.
Hurricane Fiona is now heading toward Bermuda and then eastern Canada as a major hurricane with winds of up to 215km/h.
The storm has killed at least eight people.
Fiona hit Puerto Rico five years after Hurricane Maria knocked out all power on the island in 2017.
Poweroutages.com, which estimates power outages based on utility data, said 1,033m customers were without sersaid vice early yesterday based on what it called limited information available from Luma Energy, which operates Puerto Rico’s grid.
There were roughly 1,168million without power early on Wednesday out of 1,468-million total customers, according to Poweroutages.com.
That pace of restoration is much faster than after Maria when almost all 1.5-million customers had no power for a week when the now bankrupt Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority (Prepa) was still operating the grid.
It took Prepa about 11 months to restore power to all customers, but Maria was a much more powerful storm than Fiona.
Maria hit Puerto Rico as a Category 4 hurricane with winds of 250km/h, while Fiona hit as a Category 1 storm with winds of 136km/h.
Luma Energy said late on Wednesday that it had restored service to nearly 376,000 customers. Luma has “full restoration could take several days”.
Luma is a joint venture owned by units of Canadian energy firm Atco Ltd (50%) and US energy contractor Quanta Services (50%).
Prepa still owns much of Puerto Rico’s power infrastructure. Luma won a contract to operate the grid in 2020 and started managing that system in 2021.