San Juan, Puerto Rico – A major power outage hit nearly all of Puerto Rico early Tuesday as the US territory prepares to celebrate New Year's Eve. More than 1.2 million of the 1.47 million customers were without power, according to Luma Energy, the private company that oversees the island's electricity transmission and distribution.
Luma said in a statement early Tuesday that it would take 24 to 48 hours to restore power to the entire island, “conditions permitting,” but after a few hours he said power had returned to some areas. A company spokesperson told CBS News that about 200,000 customers had power as of late afternoon.
The company said the medical center and the San Juan Municipal Hospital are back up and running, and will provide updates on the restoration of service across the island every few hours.
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Luma Energy spokesperson Hugo Sorrentini told CBS News that the power outage was caused by a failure of the power lines placed in one of the power stations called Costa Sur. The line failure knocked out the power plant and “created a waterfall effect in the system,” he said, causing other power plants on the island to go out of service.
A full investigation into what happened to the power line is ongoing, Sorrentini said.
Facilities including hospitals and water and sanitation authority facilities are “powerful” as of 3 p.m., Luma said in a statement released on social media.
Reuters quoted Ivan Baez, a spokesman for Puerto Rico's power company, Genera, as saying the grid malfunction was believed to be caused by a problem with the line used by Luma, but he also shut down Genera's plants and other independent power generators.
The Governor of Puerto Rico, Pedro Pierluisi, in a statement posted on social media said his administration was in contact with Luma and Genera “about the power outage affecting a large part of the island due to a major fault.”
He said that the work to restore electricity is ongoing and the government is “looking for answers and solutions in both Luma and Genera, which must speed up the resumption of power generation units outside the faulted area and the people should be properly informed of the measures they are taking.” to restore service to the entire island.”
Speaking to the Telemundo network late Monday, however, Josué Colón, head of Puerto Rico's electricity authority, said it could take several days to fully restore service.
Puerto Rico continues to struggle with intermittent power outages blamed on the breakdown of the power grid destroyed by Hurricane Mariaa powerful category 4 hurricane that hit the island in September 2017. The system was already crumbling before the storm given years of lack of maintenance and investment.
In a message posted Tuesday on social media, former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, whose state has the largest population of Puerto Ricans in the continental United States, said residents of the area “have been treated as second-class citizens for far too long. .”
“The fact that, as Americans, they do not have a reliable electric grid and suffer from periodic blackouts is indefensible and will not be tolerated anywhere else in the United States,” Cuomo said. “The federal government must finally acknowledge its responsibility to Puerto Rico and provide the resources and expertise needed to end this cycle of insanity once and for all.”
contributed to this report.
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