Island struggles to recover from sweeping outage
SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico — Shuttered businesses. Sleepless nights. Canceled classes. Hundreds of thousands of people across Puerto Rico remained without power Friday, nearly two days after a fire at a main power plant sparked an islandwide outage.
Crews have restored power to some 650,000 customers out of nearly 1.5 million, but people in several neighborhoods complained that the electricity went out once again as the island struggles to emerge from the blackout that also left more than 160,000 clients without water.
The outage forced the government to cancel classes and shutter agencies for the second day in a row on the U.S. territory of 3.2 million people as frustration and anger grew.
“This is unbearable,” said Maribel Hernandez, 49, who is recovering from cancer and has been sleeping on the concrete floor in her home’s narrow outdoor patio. The heat inside her house is too overwhelming.
“Those who have generators are doing well, but what about people like us?” she said, adding that she’s been forced to throw out all her food.
Officials with Luma, which took over transmission and distribution from Puerto Rico’s Electric Power company last year, have said they don’t know exactly when power would be fully restored but note crews have been working nonstop.
“The system is extremely fragile,” said Shay Bahramirad, an engineering vice president with Luma.
The company has said that a circuit-breaker failure could have caused the blackout after a fire erupted late Wednesday at the Costa Sur power plant in southern Puerto Rico, but that it will be weeks before they’ll know the exact cause of the interruption.
Meanwhile, the lack of power prompted at least one city to distribute food to the elderly and ice to those with health conditions including diabetes as many wonder when exactly they’ll have lights again.
The outage comes as Puerto Rico’s electric power company tries to emerge from bankruptcy and restructure some $9 billion in public debt.