Puerto Rico’s power grid fails hours ahead of potential arrival of storm
SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico — A day before potential Tropical Storm Isaias was expected to bring rains and winds to Puerto Rico, at least 400,000 customers throughout the island were left without power.
The outage affected multiple municipalities — from cities in the metropolitan area such as San Juan and Guaynabo to the mountainous towns of Jayuya and Naranjito to the coastal town of Cabo Rojo in the southwest.
But even on Wednesday morning, hours before the storm was expected to be felt across the island and people and officials prepared for its effects, an internal spat within Puerto Rico’s bankrupt electric utility company dominated early headlines.
Following Tuesday night’s outage, executives and workers for the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority, PREPA, could not agree on what caused the widespread blackout, as the utility’s head blamed it on “internal terrorism” and called for a federal investigation.
The renewed outrage over the island’s beleaguered electric power grid also comes after a letter from the Federal Emergency Management Agency that claimed Puerto Rico was not prepared to respond to a “major event,” according to reports from CBS News, on top of a rising number of COVID-19 cases.
Ángel Figueroa Jaramillo —president of Electrical Industry and Irrigation Workers Union, a wellknown union representing PREPA workers — tweeted about the incident. The failure originally seemed to be related to a problem in a transmission line that connects both to natural gas power plant EcoEléctrica and Costa Sur, one of PREPA’s main power stations.
According to Figueroa Jaramillo, the most affected municipality was Caguas, with 72,000 residents left without electricity.
Tuesday night, PREPA executive director José Ortiz said that they had not found the cause of the power outage, and that they continued to investigate.