Island’s power grid shaky
$3.8B spent but Puerto Rico blackout still a fear in hurricane season.
CAIN ALTO, Puerto Rico — After an eight-month, $3.8 billion federal effort to try to end the longest blackout in United States history, officials say Puerto Rico’s public electrical authority, the nation’s largest, is almost certain to collapse again when the next hurricane hits the island of 3.3 million people.
“It’s a highly fragile and vulnerable system that really could suffer worse damage than it suffered with Maria in the face of another natural catastrophe,” Puerto Rico Gov. Ricardo Rossello said.
Another weather disaster is increasingly likely as warmer seas turbocharge the strongest hurricanes into even more powerful and wetter storms. Federal forecasters say there’s a 75 percent likelihood that the 2018 Atlantic hurricane season, which begins today, will produce five to nine hurricanes. And there’s a 70 percent chance that as many as four of those could be Category 3, 4, or 5, with winds of 111 mph or higher.
“It’s inevitable that Puerto Rico will get hit again,” said Assistant Secretary Bruce Walker, head of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Electricity, which is planning the long-term redesign of the grid run by the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority.
Despite the billions of dollars plowed into the grid since Maria hit Sept. 20, Puerto Rican officials warn that it could take far less than a Category 4 storm like Maria to cause a blackout like the one that persists today, with about 11,820 homes and businesses still without power.
“The grid is there, but the grid isn’t there. It’s teetering,” said Hector Pesquera, Puerto Rico’s commissioner of public safety. “Even if it’s a [Category] 1, it is in such a state that I think we’re going to lose power. I don’t know for how long.”
Federal officials and Puerto Rican leaders blame decades of mismanagement that left the island’s power authority more than $9 billion in debt after declaring bankruptcy last year. Expensive projects were started then canceled. Politicians approved cheap power for well-connected corporations. By the time Maria hit, wooden power poles were rotted, transmission towers had rusted through and overgrown trees menaced thousands of miles of power lines.
In many places across Puerto Rico, federal emergency funds allocated in the aftermath of the disaster made up for years of neglected maintenance, replacing decaying infrastructure with tens of thousands of new poles and hundreds of miles of power lines rushed from the U.S. mainland at a steep premium.
But in other areas, crews without adequate supplies patched together damaged poles and power lines in a desperate push to restore power. In the western highlands, power cables were spliced together and woven haphazardly through trees, in violation of basic safety codes.
“We patched things up. We worked with the little material that was available and we recycled material. We took the 1,000 feet of wire that was on the ground and we strung it up in another area,” one power authority worker said, speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation from management. “We took the post that had fallen over or broken and we put it up somewhere else. A lot of the work is defective.”
Fredyson Martinez, vice president of the power authority workers’ union, said he estimates that roughly 10 percent to 15 percent of the repair work done over the past eight months did not meet basic quality standards.
“The logistics were terrible. I give it an F,” he said. “Things need to be fixed.”
Federal and Puerto Rican officials are preparing for another catastrophe that cuts power for weeks or months. The Federal Emergency Management Agency is leaving about 600 generators installed in key sites such as hospitals and water-pumping stations, more than six times the number before Maria. FEMA has stockpiled 5.4 million liters of water and more than 80,000 tarps, and is distributing them and other emergency supplies to towns across the island so they will be in place for the next disaster.
Power company director Walter Higgins said crews also are preparing to strengthen the power grid, a project he estimates will take years and could cost $5 billion to $8 billion. He said that within four months, crews in the nearby islands of Vieques and Culebra will start building the grid to modern standards.
Still, few people believe Puerto Rico is truly ready.
“If a hurricane comes tomorrow, it will leave the island completely without power again,” said Juan Rosario, a community activist and former member of the power authority’s board of directors.
Up to 4,645 more deaths than usual occurred in Puerto Rico in the three months after Maria, contends a new study published this week by the New England Journal of Medicine, an estimate that far exceeds the official government death toll of 64.