Puerto Rico was plunged into darkness early Tuesday morning due to a power outage across most of the island.
The cause of the power outage is under investigation, but preliminary findings point to a groundwater failure, according to Luma Energy, the island’s main electricity distributor. Full restoration of the service may take between 24-48 hours, the company said on X.
According to the New York Times, only 13 percent of the island’s 1.4 million customers had power around 1000 AST (1400 GMT).
An hour later, power was restored to some areas, including the San Juan Municipal Hospital, Luma said.
The New Year’s Eve power outage prompted renewed calls from elected officials and residents to address the unincorporated U.S. territory’s ongoing power problems that have lingered since Hurricane Maria in 2017.
The island can no longer put up with an energy system that so often fails its citizens, Jenniffer González-Colon, Puerto Rico’s current representative in the US Congress and incoming governor of Puerto Rico, wrote on Xu.
The power outage continues to affect Puerto Rico’s economy and quality of life, she said.
On Facebook, the current governor, Pedro Pierluisi, asked for answers and solutions from the two main energy companies, Luma and Genera.
Hundreds of thousands of residents were suddenly affected by power outages this year. The June outage left about 350,000 customers without power as temperatures soared, and more than 700,000 customers were left without power after Hurricane Ernesto in August.
As they woke up to another day without power, Puerto Ricans expressed their frustration to the US media.
“They are part of my daily life,” Enid Núñez, 49, told The Associated Press of the interruptions.
Puerto Rico’s power grid was strained even before Hurricane Maria ravaged the island. US government funding has helped strengthen the grid, facilitate recovery projects from other natural disasters and make other important infrastructure improvements.
But implementation has been incomplete due to a number of factors, such as problems starting construction and requests from the Federal Emergency Management Agency to authorize the use of some funds, according to a February 2024 document. report from the US Government Accountability Office.
“Inexcusably, the power grid has still not recovered from the damage from Hurricane Maria,” Mark Levine, president of the New York Borough of Manhattan, wrote on X.
New York is home to the largest Puerto Rican community in the US mainland.
“These are 3.5 million American citizens,” he wrote. “We owe them a lot better.”
