San Juan, Puerto Rico — A major power outage hit nearly all of Puerto Rico early Tuesday as the U.S. territory prepared to celebrate the New Year. More than 1.2 million of the 1.47 million customers were without power, according to Luma Energy, the private company that oversees electricity transmission and distribution on the island.
Luma it is stated in the press release early Tuesday it would likely take between 24 and 48 hours to restore power to the entire island, “conditions permitting,” but a few hours later it said service had been restored in some areas. A company spokesman told CBS News that nearly 200,000 customers had power as of late afternoon.
The company said the San Juan Medical Center and Municipal Hospital are back in operation and will provide further updates every few hours on the restoration of service islandwide.
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Luma Energy spokesman Hugo Sorrentini told CBS News that the blackout was caused by a fault in one of the power lines located at one of the main power plants called Costa Sur. The line failure caused the power plant to shut down and then “created a waterfall effect in the system,” he said, leading to power outages on the island.
A full investigation into what happened to the power line is ongoing, Sorrentini said.
Facilities, including hospitals and water supply and sewerage facilities, are “under voltage” from 3 p.m., said Luma u update on social media.
Reuters quoted Ivan Baez, a spokesman for Puerto Rican primary power generator Genera, as saying the grid failure was believed to be caused by a problem with a line operated by Luma, but also knocked out plants belonging to Genera and some other private power producers.
Governor of Puerto Rico Pedro Pierluisi said ua publish on social networks that his administration communicated with both Lum and Gener “in connection with a major power outage affecting a large part of the island due to a critical fault.”
He said that work was underway to restore the electricity supply and that the government “requires answers and solutions from both Luma and Genera, which must speed up the restart of generating units outside the outage area and inform people in a timely manner of the measures they are taking to restore service throughout the island.”
However, speaking to the Telemundo network late Monday, Josué Colón, head of the Puerto Rican Electricity Authority, said it could take a few days to fully restore the service.
Puerto Rico continues to struggle with chronic power outages blamed on the crumbling power grid that was leveled by Hurricane Mariaa powerful Category 4 storm that hit the island in September 2017. The system was already in decline before the storm due to years of lack of maintenance and investment.
In a message posted on social media Tuesday, former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, whose state has one of the largest populations of Puerto Ricans in the continental US, said residents of the territory “have been treated as second-class citizens for too long.”
“The fact that, as Americans, we do not have a reliable electrical grid and suffer intermittent power outages on an ongoing basis is indefensible and would not be tolerated anywhere else in the United States,” Cuomo said. “The federal government must finally recognize its responsibility to Puerto Rico and provide the resources and expertise needed to end this cycle of madness once and for all.”
contributed to this report.
