Puerto Rico is suffering from an island-wide blackout Wednesday, as the fragile power grid struggles to return to full capacity after Hurricane Maria wiped out an already crippled energy system.
The Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority, the island’s state-run bankrupt utility known as PREPA, confirmed the latest outage, saying it could take 24 to 36 hours to restore power. It did not explain the cause.
PREPA said Tuesday that 97 percent of customers have had power restored following Hurricane Maria in September.
But the island has faced periodic outages since the hurricane, including last week, when a tree branch fell on a power line and cut electricity to roughly 800,00 people.
Wednesday’s outage comes after a top Army Corps of Engineers official testified to Congress last week that Puerto Rico’s power grid is “in much better condition” than before Maria.
“It is no secret the grid was in very poor condition before the storm,” said Charles Alexander, director of contingency operations and homeland security headquarters at the Army Corps, in testimony before the House Energy and Commerce Committee. “It is in much better condition today. The reality is, we have put in place new transmission, new distribution lines, new towers, new poles, and other power generation equipment.”
But Alexander acknowledged that nearly 50,000 customers remain without power on the island, and he would not say definitively if all Puerto Ricans would have their lights back on by the scheduled end of the Corps’ recovery mission on May 18.
“It is not the resilient grid we all recognize is needed,” Alexander said. “We are going to do everything possible to get to as close to 100 percent [power restoration] as possible.”
