SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (AP) — Tens of thousands of customers were without power in Puerto Rico on Tuesday, a week after Ernesto swept across the US territory as a tropical stormAuthorities promised to restore power to everyone by the weekend.
The National Weather Service has issued another heat advisory, warning of “dangerously hot and humid conditions.”
More than 40,000 of nearly 1.5 million households were without power in the afternoon. All schools should have power back on by Tuesday evening, officials said. About 80 percent of emergency clinics (excluding hospitals) have electricity.
The coastal town of Luquillo in the northeast, which is popular with tourists, reported the most outages: 30 percent of customers were without power. The cities of Fajardo, Río Grande and Yabucoa were also affected.
Juan Saca, president of Luma Energy, a private consortium that oversees power transmission and distribution in Puerto Rico, said the company is working “around the clock,” but in addition to the outages blamed on the storm, there is also a deficit in power generation.
Up to 70,000 customers could be temporarily without power late Tuesday, and another 90,000 were affected by a manual power outage in Puerto Rico’s power grid on Monday.
“It’s very annoying, I don’t want to downplay it,” Saca told reporters, stressing that the outages were only temporary.
Luma has been under fire since taking over transmission and distribution in June 2021 as Puerto Rico’s electric company struggles to restructure its more than $9 billion in debt.
Recently, more and more officials, including those seeking to collect votes in an election year, have called on the government to terminate Luma’s contract.
Governor Pedro Pierluisi supported Luma’s work and the rapid response after Ernesto. “Within three days, 96 percent of the population already had electricity,” he said on Monday.
During the storm that swept across the island last Tuesday and Wednesday, 750,000 homes were without power at its peak. Authorities blamed trees falling on power lines and strong winds.
Yet anger persists on the island, where 3.2 million people live, more than 40 percent of the population is poor and few can afford generators or solar panels.
“Given the damage caused by the storm and LUMA Energy’s inability to provide energy with precision and flexibility, Puerto Rico urgently needs other, more reliable sources of energy,” said Jesús Hernández Arroyo, chairman of the House of Representatives’ Energy Commission.
Puerto Rico’s Energy Department questioned why the average outage duration per customer increased 9% to a total of 1,448 minutes in fiscal year 2023-2024.
Julio Aguilar, Luma’s director of reliability and distribution automation, said at Tuesday’s press conference that weather and other factors can cause the number of outages to rise or fall within a year, and that it takes five years to establish a baseline and metrics.
“The improvements are happening,” he said. “They will be visible.”
Puerto Rico’s Power grid remains fragile after destruction by Hurricane Maria in September 2017 by a severe Category 4 storm, although the network was already in disrepair due to a lack of maintenance and investment.
