Recovering power may take up to two days. Massive blackout was caused by a failure in the electrical grid.
A critical failure in Puerto Rico’s electrical grid caused a massive blackout that affects a large part of the island, according to an account in Governor Pedro Pierluisi’s X account, explains the
According to , the Canadian-American company responsible for distributing and transmitting energy on the island, the New Year’s Eve blackout it cut power to around 1.3 million users, that is, around 88% of customers.
“We can inform you that work is already underway to restore service at the San Juan and Palo Seco plants,” said Pierluisi.
“We demand answers and solutions from both Luma and Genera, which must speed up the restart of units generators outside the fault area and keep the population properly informed about the measures they are taking to restore service throughout the island.”
However, the company admits that restoring power in the country should take between 1 and 2 days.
As CNN points out, Power outages on the island have been a long-standing source of frustration for Puerto Ricans that depend on a fragile and poorly maintained electrical grid, with slow modernization efforts to materialize over several decades, first by a publicly owned entity and today by a private caretaker.
In 2017, after being hit by Hurricane Maria, the country suffered biggest blackout in US history. Since then, the US Federal Emergency Management Agency has allocated $9.9 billion (about €9.5 billion) to permanent repair projects of the damage caused by Hurricane Maria.
Even sothe country has suffered from the same evil every time there is a hurricane, as was the case with Ernesto, in August this year, during which around half of LUMA’s customer population was left without power.
