Needed equipment headed to Puerto Rico

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico — Federal officials said Monday that efforts to fully restore power to Puerto Rico in the wake of Hurricane Maria should get a boost with more work crews and more supplies arriving in the coming weeks.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers said that it is getting its own barge to ship items and that materials it requested several months ago have been manufactured and are finally on their way to the U.S. territory.

“We’re doing everything we can to increase the (power company’s) ability to do this as fast as possible for the people of Puerto Rico,” said Col. John Lloyd, who is helping oversee power restoration efforts for the Corps of Engineers.

He told The Associated Press that officials over the weekend also discovered some needed materials in a previously overlooked warehouse owned by Puerto Rico’s Electric Power Authority.

The lack of some of those hard-to-find pieces had delayed energizing certain lines, according to the Corps of Engineers, which said the material included transformers, splices and hundreds of a key small piece no longer in stock elsewhere.

Puerto Rico’s energy infrastructure is about 44 years old, compared with an average 18 years on the U.S. mainland, so a lot of parts damaged or destroyed by the hurricane are no longer available and have to be manufactured, Lloyd said.

It is unclear why power company officials had not provided the equipment previously. The Corps of Engineers said that the company’s transmission division controls that warehouse and that it lacked transparency in inventory and accountability. Power company spokesman Carlos Monroig did not return a message asking for comment.

More than 40 percent of Puerto Rico’s power customers remain in the dark nearly four months after the Category 4 storm hit the island, causing an estimated $95 billion in damage and killing dozens of people. Classes are resuming this week even though hundreds of public schools are still without power. Only 20 percent of intersections with stoplights have been powered.

Lloyd said crews are still assessing damage and his agency is still waiting for the shipment of hundreds of thousands of poles, transformers, fuses, towers, insulators, bolts and other pieces.

Lloyd said most of the island should have power by the end of February or early March.