Puerto Rico faces island-wide blackout, sparking anger from officials
Global News
The outage that began past noon Wednesday left 1.4 million customers without electricity and more than 400,000 without water.
Crews scrambled to restore power to Puerto Rico on Thursday after a blackout hit the entire island, affecting the main international airport, hospitals and hotels filled with Easter vacationers.
The outage that began past noon Wednesday left 1.4 million customers without electricity and more than 400,000 without water. More than 826,600 customers, or 56 per cent, had power back by Thursday afternoon, while 83 per cent of customers had water restored. Officials expected 90 per cent of customers to have power back within 48 to 72 hours after the outage.
“This is a shame for the people of Puerto Rico that we have a problem of this magnitude,” said Gov. Jenniffer González, who cut her weeklong vacation short and returned to Puerto Rico on Wednesday evening.
She said it would take at least three days to have preliminary information on what might have caused the blackout, which snarled traffic, forced hundreds of businesses to close and left those unable to afford generators scrambling to buy ice and candles.
“There’s still a long road of recovery,” she said. “Our system is very fragile.”
It’s the second massive blackout to hit Puerto Rico in less than four months, with the previous one occurring on New Year’s Eve.
“Why on holidays?” griped José Luis Richardson, who did not have a generator and kept cool by splashing water on himself every couple of hours.
The roar of generators and smell of fumes filled the air as a growing number of Puerto Ricans renewed calls for the government to cancel the contracts with Luma Energy, which oversees the transmission and distribution of power, and Genera PR, which oversees generation.
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