- Puerto Rico’s power was restored after a New Year’s Eve blackout sent the island into darkness.
- Still, the island’s power company warned that there could be more electricity outages.
- Local business owners in San Juan told BI about their struggles to recover.
Small business owners and workers in Puerto Rico say they’re struggling to recover from a massive power outage earlier this week that left the entire island without electricity.
Puerto Rico’s electricity has mostly been restored after the blackout on New Year’s Eve cut the power for more than 1.2 million customers. But the local energy company warned that it may need to schedule more rolling outages because the power grid is so fragile.
One business owner told BI that they’d tried their best to recover from the New Year’s Eve outage, only to be hit with another outage on Friday
“It’s very, very surreal because we were about to have the whole system online today — and the technicians were already working before we opened the lunch service — and all of a sudden the system went out again,” Gabriel Hernandez, the chef and co-owner of Verde Mesa restaurant in San Juan, told Business Insider.
The restaurant had already had to cancel its New Year’s Eve dinner service because even though power was restored on Tuesday afternoon, it was too late to scramble to open.
“Once the power’s restored, there’s another layer of work that has to be done, which is to check our produce, check if our refrigerators are working, check our antenna and WiFi,” Hernandez said.
Ricardo Arduengo/REUTERS
And in the days since, he’s also had to reduce the restaurant’s seating capacity to below 50% of normal, he said. The blackout caused the restaurant’s WiFi antenna to go out, downing its point-of-sale system, which Hernandez said he hasn’t been able to get fixed.
Operating at less than half capacity has been especially difficult during one of the busiest weeks of the year, he said. He estimated the restaurant’s losses are already in the thousands of dollars.
And, he said, the restaurant will never be able to make that back. “Unless we have somebody inject money that we lost, we don’t recuperate money,” Hernandez said.
Puerto Rico’s power company warns of more outages
Luma Energy, the private company that transmits and distributes power in the territory, said in an X post on Thursday morning that 99% of its 1.4 million customers were back in service. It didn’t respond to multiple inquiries from Business Insider.
The company urged customers to limit their energy consumption and use backup energy wherever possible as the electric system gets back up to speed. Luma initially attributed the blackout to the failure of an underground cable, but said on Thursday the cause was still under investigation.
The island-wide blackout, which happened around dawn on Tuesday, threw the New Year’s Eve plans of the territory’s more than 3 million residents into disarray.
The owner of another restaurant in San Juan, who didn’t want to be named, told BI that she lost about a thousand dollars worth of refrigerated items — mostly produce and fish — when the power went out on Tuesday.
Luckily, she said, the restaurant was already closed that day, but because she doesn’t have backup generators, she couldn’t save her perishable inventory. And her restaurant’s margins are already very slim, she said, so it won’t be easy to make back that lost money.
Ricardo Arduengo/REUTERS
Hotels, too, lost money during this week’s power outage. Jose Lopez told Business Insider that the small eight-room hotel Villa Herencia, where he works in San Juan, had to refund a few guests who left early during Tuesday’s outage.
But, he said, power service has been good since it was restored, and the hotel hasn’t experienced any smaller outages.
One café worker in San Juan, who didn’t want to be named, said that while his café suffered some losses this week, it was able to continue operating through the blackout thanks to its generator. People from around the neighborhood were able to come in and get food during the outage, he said.
Though some businesses and residences had their power restored by Tuesday afternoon or evening, others had to wait longer. Ryan Pamplin, a 36-year-old business owner, told BI that the power at his house in Dorado took 23 hours to come back on. Once it did, it went out again a few hours later and remained out for most of New Year’s Day.
The island’s power system has been an issue for a long time
Puerto Rico has for years dealt with a sometimes rickety power system, highlighted in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria in 2017 and Hurricane Fiona in 2022.
Tuesday’s widespread outage came as the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority, or PREPA, has been trying to restructure its debt, which The Associated Press said stood at more than $9 billion.
Puerto Rico’s new governor, Jenniffer González Colón, who was sworn in on Thursday, has called out the territory’s ailing power grid and promised that stabilizing it will be her top priority.
