By Rich McKay and Ivelisse Rivera
SAN JUAN (Reuters) – Puerto Ricans were without power on New Year’s Eve after a grid failure left almost the entire island without power, although power was slowly being restored.
About 58% of customers were without power at 21:00 (01:00 GMT) on Tuesday, down from 90% earlier in the day, according to the website of power distribution company LUMA Energy. Puerto Rico has long dealt with chronic blackouts as its infrastructure crumbles.
It will likely take 24 to 48 hours for the lights to come back on, LUMA said in a statement. It was later added that power had been restored to some critical facilities, including Centro Medico and the City Hospital of San Juan.
“Although the cause of the fault is under investigation, preliminary findings point to a fault in the underground line,” LUMA said.
Ivan Baez, a spokesman for power generator Genera, said in an interview with local radio that the line believed to have failed was operated by LUMA and had knocked out facilities belonging to Genera as well as private generators.
LUMA did not respond to direct questions about liability for power lines.
Puerto Rico Governor Pedro Pierluisi said in a social media post that LUMA and Genera “need to expedite the reactivation of the generator units … and inform the people of the measures they are taking to restore service to the entire island.”
‘MORE THAN A DECADE IN THE MAKING’
Ramon Luis Nieves, 49, a lawyer in San Juan and a former senator on the island, said New Year’s Eve is usually a time for family gatherings, popping bottles of champagne and watching fireworks. A power outage could dampen celebrations this year, he said.
“My wife and I have to figure it out,” he said. – We cannot visit my wife’s family after dark.
He added that he was not surprised by the shutdown, especially after Hurricane Maria, a Category 4 storm that hit the island hard in 2017.
Nieves has long been a critic of power grid operators.
“This disaster has been more than a decade in the making,” he said. “The (electricity) generators are old, long past their life expectancy, and the operators have not invested properly for years.”
Such an opinion is common on the Caribbean island, an American territory whose inhabitants are American citizens, but do not have the right to vote in Congress and cannot vote in presidential elections. The protesters called on the island’s government to cancel its contract with LUMA.
In response to the 2022 protest, LUMA said it “inherited an electrical system that had suffered years, indeed decades, of neglect.”
Steven Pacheco, a 55-year-old former field official, was visiting for the holidays from St. Petersburg, Florida.
He said it was frustrating for everyone to be “constantly on edge, expecting that these emergencies could happen again.”
Jenniffer González, who takes office as governor of Puerto Rico on Thursday, said on social media that she is forming an energy task force to deal with frequent power outages.
“We cannot continue with an energy system that so often fails our people,” she wrote. “Events like this morning’s power outage and the uncertainty of quickly restoring power to the island continue to affect our economy and quality of life.”
(Reporting by Ivelisse Rivera in San Juan and Kylie Madry in Asheville, North Carolina, and Rich McKay in Atlanta; Editing by Alistair Bell, Aurora Ellis and Neil Fullick)
