- A massive blackout in Puerto Rico left more than 1.3 million power company customers in the dark.
- Luma Energy, the power company, said restoring power could take up to 48 hours.
- It said that the outage appears to have been caused by the failure of an underground power line.
A massive blackout hit Puerto Rico early Tuesday morning — and it could take days to restore power.
The outage, which struck around dawn, the Associated Press reported, left nearly 90% of private power company Luma Energy’s 1.47 million customers without power, the company told the AP.
Luma said the issue appeared to have stemmed from the failure of an underground cable. It said fully restoring power could take anywhere from 24 to 48 hours.
On its social media, it said it would begin restoring power “in phases.” For instance, by 11 a.m. Eastern, the utility said it had restored power to the Municipal Hospital of San Juan, among other locations. And as of 1 p.m., the utility said it had restored power to just 44,700 customers — or 3% of customers without power.
That means that at least 1.2 million customers remained without power as of Tuesday afternoon throughout the island territory of the US.
“It had to be on the 31st of December!” one man told the AP, standing outside a grocery store in San Juan. He said the power outage came on his birthday. “There is no happiness,” he said.
Puerto Rico has dealt with a sometimes rickety power system for years — highlighted in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria in 2017 and again with Hurricane Fiona in 2022.
Luma is in charge of distributing energy across the island, while a company called Genera PR provides the power — both have been under scrutiny for the territory’s frequent outages, The New York Times has reported.
In a statement posted on Facebook, translated by the Times, Puerto Rico’s Gov. Pedro Pierluisi said: “We are demanding answers,” adding that the two power companies “must expedite the restart of the generating units outside the fault area and keep the people duly informed about the measures they are taking to restore service throughout the island.”
