Lights shine throughout Puerto Rico 1 year later

PONCE, Puerto Rico — Jazmín Mendez has lived much of the last year in the dark. No light to read by. No food cooled in the fridge. No television for her three children.

Work crews have repaired storm-damaged Puerto Rico’s electricity grid in fits and starts over the past 11 months, but they had never managed to light up Méndez’s mountaintop home — until this week, when she was told she would be among the very last residential customers of the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority to have service restored.

“The first thing I will do is give thanks to God,” she said, sitting in her living room surrounded by beach coolers, water jugs and gas cans.

It has been a long wait for Mendez, 44, who embodies the many woes that the island’s population suffered after Hurricane Maria.

After spending $3.2 billion, erecting some 52,000 new electrical poles and stringing 6,000 miles of wire from the federal government alone, the Puerto Rico electricity system is not in much better condition now than it was before Maria cut power to every home and business on the island.

Even as the last customers are reconnected, many billions of dollars more must still be spent to reconstruct the system and fortify the transmission lines that have been so tattered and poorly maintained that when a mishap occurs, the lights can go out on the entire island.

The new head of the electric utility estimates that up to one-quarter of the work done hurriedly to illuminate Puerto Rico after the storm will have to be redone.

“There are many patches — too many patches — developed just to bring power to the people,” said Jose Ortiz, the new chief executive of the power authority, known as PREPA. “Now, we have to redo that thing.”