P. RICO ZAPPED AGAIN

Island-wide blackout

All of Puerto Rico was hit by a blackout on Wednesday when an excavator being used to remove a collapsed electrical tower hit a power line, officials said.

A utility spokesman said there was “zero percent” power generation across the island, which has continued to struggle with an unstable power grid almost seven months after being devastated by Hurricane Maria.

“The breakdown affected the entire electrical system and generating plants,” Geraldo Quiñones López of Puerto Rico’s Electric Power Authority said.

Less than a week after 870,000 customers were left without electricity when a tree fell onto a major power line, officials said it could take 24 to 36 hours to fully restore electricity following the latest incident.

“This is too much,” said Luis Oscar Rivera, 42, a computer technician who finally got power back at his house less than two months ago. “It’s like the first day of Maria all over again.”

The outage comes two days after the utility published an online video celebrating the restoration of power to 97 percent of its customers, The Washington Post reported.

It was the first time since the Category 4 storm struck on Sept. 20 that the entire island was plunged into darkness.

Before the latest blackout, about 40,000 customers were still awaiting their first power restoration.

Despite the outage, the scheduled Wednesday-night game in San Juan between the Cleveland Indians and Minnesota Twins went on — going 16 innings before the Twins won, 2-1.

“All emergency systems at Hiram Bithorn Stadium have been tested just now and are fully functional,” San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulin Cruz tweeted earlier. “The game will GO ON. Nothing will stop us,”

Angel Figueroa, president of a utility union, said workers were investigating why a backup breaker in the island’s southern region did not function when the outage occurred, causing the entire grid to shut down.

According to economics-research firm Rhodium Group, more than 3.4 billion hours of electricity have been lost on the island — making it the secondlargest blackout in world history, CNN reported.

The only blackout bigger than Puerto Rico’s was the one that resulted from Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines in 2013. About 6.1 billion hours of power were lost after that storm.

The Puerto Rico outage is already the worst in US history, topping those caused by Hurricane Georges in 1998 and Hurricane Sandy in 2012.