3+ months after Maria, barely half of Puerto Rico has power

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (AP) — Puerto Rico authorities said Friday that nearly half of power customers in the U.S. territory still lack electricity more than three months after Hurricane Maria, sparking outrage among islanders who accuse the government of mismanaging its response to the Category 4 storm.

Officials said 55 percent of the nearly 1.5 million customers have power, marking the first time the government has provided that statistic since Maria hit on Sept. 20 with winds of up to 154 mph. Officials had previously reported only power generation, which stands at nearly 70 percent of pre-storm levels.

“It’s just extraordinary that it is still so far away from being 100 percent recovered,” said Susan Tierney, a senior adviser for Denver-based consulting company Analysis Group who testified before a U.S. Senate committee on efforts to restore power in Puerto Rico. “I’m not aware of any time in recent decades since the U.S. has electrified the entire economy that there has been an outage of this magnitude.”

One of Puerto Rico’s 78 municipalities remains entirely without power, and it’s unclear when some electricity will be restored to the central mountain town of Ciales.

Crews this week restored power for the first time to parts of the southeast coastal town of Yabucoa, which received the first hit from Maria.

Among those still in the dark is Christian Pagan, 58, who lives near the capital of San Juan and said it was the government’s fault that a large number of people still don’t have power.

“Everybody saw that the devastation was great, but I don’t understand why they’re trying to sell people something that’s not real,” he said of the explanations the government has provided as to why power has not been fully restored. “The first month was lost to bureaucracy and an uncoordinated reaction.”

He especially criticized the power company’s former director, Ricardo Ramos, who resigned in late October after signing a $300 million contract for a Montana-based company that had only two fulltime employees when the storm hit. Ramos also had said that he did not activate mutual-aid agreements with power companies in the U.S. mainland in part because there was no way to communicate with them. “That’s the kind of help you ask for three days before the hurricane,” Pagan said. It is not yet known what percentage of businesses and homes now have electricity. Power company spokesman Geraldo Quinones told The Associated Press that officials are still working to obtain that data, stressing that the optical fiber that helps provide the number of customers with power and other data was destroyed by the hurricane.

Gov. Ricardo Rossello had pledged 95 percent power generation by Dec. 15, while the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has said the entire island will have power by May.

Fredyson Martinez, vice president of a union that represents workers with Puerto Rico’s power company, told the AP on Friday that a recent study by local engineers found that 90 percent of industries and 75 percent of businesses already have power, meaning residential areas are disproportionately in the dark. Martinez said the company should have provided the number of customers without power a while ago, adding that officials had other ways of obtaining the information despite the damaged fiber optic cable.