San Juan, Puerto Rico— A massive power outage struck nearly all of Puerto Rico early on New Year’s Eve, leaving more than 1.2 million of the island’s 1.47 million customers without power, according to Luma Energy, a private company in charge of electricity transmission and distribution.
By late Tuesday evening, Luma reported that power had been restored to approximately 700,000 customers, or roughly half of those affected.
The company had warned early Tuesday that it could take up to 48 hours to restore power across the island, “conditions permitting,” but a few hours later it announced that service had been restored in some areas.
Luma announced late Tuesday that at least 31 hospitals and medical centers across Puerto Rico, as well as both airports in the capital city of San Juan, had reopened.
Hugo Sorrentini, a spokesperson for Luma Energy, told CBS News that the blackout was caused by an electric line failure at one of the main power plants, Costa Sur. The line failure caused the power plant to go out of service, which “created a waterfall effect in the system,” he explained, causing the other power plants on the island to go out of service as well.
Sorrentini stated that a thorough investigation into what caused the electric line to fail was currently underway.
According to Reuters, Ivan Baez, a spokesperson for Puerto Rico’s primary energy generator Genera, said the grid failure was believed to be caused by a problem with a Luma-operated line, but it also brought down Genera and other private electricity generators.
Puerto Rico Gov. Pedro Pierluisi stated in a social media post that his administration is in contact with both Luma and Genera “regarding the massive blackout affecting a large part of the Island due to a critical fault.”
He stated that work was underway to restore electrical power and that the government was “demanding answers and solutions from both Luma and Genera, who must expedite the restart of the generating units outside the fault area and keep the people duly informed about the measures they are taking to restore service throughout the Island.”
Puerto Rico is still experiencing chronic power outages, which are being blamed on a crumbling power grid that was destroyed by Hurricane Maria, a powerful category 4 storm that hit the island in September 2017. Prior to the storm, the system had been deteriorating due to years of neglect and underinvestment.
Former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, whose state has one of the largest populations of Puerto Ricans in the continental United States, wrote on social media Tuesday that residents of the territory had been “treated as second class citizens for far too long.”
“The fact that, as Americans, they don’t have a reliable electric grid and suffer sporadic blackouts on a continuous basis is indefensible and would not be tolerated anywhere else in the United States,” the governor said.
“The federal government must finally acknowledge its responsibility to Puerto Rico and provide the resources and expertise necessary to end this cycle of insanity once and for all.”
