A month after Maria, Puerto Rico awaits power
80 percent of island is without electricity; water is intermittent
CAGUAS, Puerto Rico — Luis Rodríguez looked at the huge concrete power pole in his front yard, resting on his daughter’s Chevrolet and blocking the tow truck he drives to make a living, and wondered: When is help coming?
“Usually, after something like this happens, people are out on the streets working immediately,” said Rodríguez, who lives with his 16-year-old daughter. “But this time, the government’s response has been very slow.”
Four weeks after Hurricane Maria, packing winds of as high as 155 mph, knocked out power to the entire island, 80 percent of Puerto Rico does not have electricity. Some residents have not had power for 45 days — since Hurricane Irma brushed by after Labor Day.
For Rodríguez, that means using candles for lighting and a gas stove for cooking. He buys ham and cheese sandwiches and coffee for breakfast.
“The water comes and goes, comes and goes, and it’s just a trickle,” he said.
All the food he cooks comes out of cans.
Few outside repair workers
In contrast with Texas after Hurricane Harvey and Florida after Irma, where thousands of workers rushed in, only a few hundred electrical workers from outside the island have arrived.
It was not until Saturday that the Puerto Rican government said it had the federal funding needed to bring in more workers. And until a week ago, the small Montana company hired to get the lights back on had only 165 workers on the ground; it now has about 300.
In comparison, 5,300 workers from outside the region converged on coastal Texas in the days after Hurricane Harvey to restore a power loss that was about a tenth the size, said Larry Jones, a spokesman for AEP Texas. Electricity was back on for almost everyone within two weeks.
In Florida, 18,000 outside workers went in after Hurricane Irma knocked out electricity to most of the state last month, according to FPL, Florida’s largest power company.
In Puerto Rico, the brunt of the work has been left to the 900 members of local crews.
Industry experts said poor planning, a slow response by power officials and Puerto Rico’s dire financial straits had led to a situation that would be unfathomable in the continental United States. Logistical challenges — like where to house the thousands of extra workers needed to get the lights back on — have not been resolved.
“Thirty days after the storm, I see very little progress,” said Eduardo Bhatia, an opposition senator who in 2014 wrote an energy reform law. “I don’t see the boots on the field doing the work, and that is a tragedy.”
At the White House on Thursday, President Donald Trump said the administration deserved a 10 for its response to the hurricanes that struck Puerto Rico and other parts of the U.S.
But he conceded the destruction of the power grid was one of Puerto Rico’s biggest long-term challenges, despite the provision of “massive numbers” of generators to temporarily provide electricity to hospitals and other crucial facilities.
“You can’t really bring electric back until you rebuild the power plant,” Trump said during an appearance with Gov. Ricardo A. Rosselló of Puerto Rico. The federal government will help rebuild the power grid, he said, but “the plant itself is going to take a while.”
Even local utility employees are frustrated.
“We need trucks; we need poles; we need crews; we need lines; we need more people,” said Javier Hernández Saurí, a lineman who led a team of workers making their way up Rodríguez’s street. “It’s going very slowly. We’re rewiring mostly with materials that can be reused.”
The Army Corps of Engineers, charged by the Federal Emergency Management Agency with restoring Puerto Rico’s power, estimated that it needed at least 2,000 additional workers.
So far, the Corps has brought only about 200 workers, and most of them were dedicated not to restoring power but to installing generators at crucial locations.
After major storms, power companies typically rely on mutual aid agreements to get electricity restored. Outside companies send thousands of workers, and electric companies pay for the service with funds from FEMA.
Ricardo Ramos, chief executive of the power authority, said outside companies had been hesitant to come until they knew where the storm would make landfall. After that, he needed several days to assess the damage, and communications were down.
By the time Ramos had a full grasp of the damage a week after the storm, he said, the Corps of Engineers had been tasked with overseeing power restoration, a duty outside its usual purview.
Not enough crews
The Montana company he hired, Whitefish Energy Holdings, agreed to do the work without a down payment. The chief executive, Andy Techmanski, said he got the contract because he showed up in Puerto Rico unannounced. Ramos expressed no regrets. “I mobilized what I could, which was private contractors, and I am happy with the decision,” he said. “I would do exactly the same. I think we’re right on target.”
When Hurricane Hugo hit in 1989, Ramos said, repairs took six months.
But on Saturday, Rosselló committed to a more aggressive timetable, pledging to have 95 percent of power restored by December. His public affairs secretary, Ramón Rosario Cortés, acknowledged that the crews in place were not enough.
“We have 230 brigades. If we used only these brigades, we’d be talking long months — years,” Rosario said.
The governor said an additional 966 brigades would be trickling in over the next three weeks.